PROFESSOR Elizabeth Dowler’s important letter (There’s no evidence that increased food aid help is driving demand, July 7) on why there has been and is increasing use of food banks, should be at the top of Iain Duncan Smith’s in-tray. Or taped to his forehead.

Prof Dowler writes of “often negative encounters with the social security system through errors, loss of entitlement and sanction imposition”, day-to-day realities for many people here in Oxford and Oxfordshire and beyond.

My wife and I run an HE access course for speakers of languages other than English, most mature students with families, many former asylum seekers, now refugees, UK citizens, or somewhere in-between, who struggle constantly with the inefficient, often hostile and, in effect, punitive administration of the benefits system and in many cases have been referred to food banks and live with corrosive uncertainty over food and accommodation.

As Elizabeth Dowler states: “Governments have a responsibility to ensure no one is left destitute or unable to eat”, and although she might not wish “to make a political point”, her letter and its conclusion are both political and moral, if not party political, that is a call to arms on behalf of the increasing number of UK residents who are living a Victorian subsistence which has no place in a country with the sixth largest economy in the world. It must be hoped that the Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty will make a difference, sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Prof Dowler must not be speaking in and to a vacuum.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford

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