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Nearly Four in Ten UK Households With a Person With a Disability Cannot Afford Enough Food

By the Living Unlimited Team

A new UK government review of disability benefits landed this month, and its central finding is one worth sitting with. Benefits meant to cover the extra costs of living with a health condition, the review said, are getting in the way of people who want to work. That framing is now shaping how one of the world’s largest economies talks about disability income. It arrives against a backdrop that is harder to argue with: in the UK, households that include a person with a disability are going without enough food at rates far above everyone else.

We are reporting this because the pattern reaches beyond Britain, and the questions it raises are already live in Canada.

The number, and where it comes from

The figure that anchors this is from the Food Foundation, a UK charity that has run nationally representative food-insecurity surveys since the start of the pandemic. Its analysis found that nearly four in ten households where an adult is limited a lot by disability were food insecure (37.7 per cent), compared with just over one in ten households (13.3 per cent) with no one who has a disability. In the first weeks of the pandemic the gap was threefold; by early 2022 it had widened to more than fivefold.

The problem has not eased. The Food Foundation’s most recent data, reported by Disability Rights UK in March 2026, shows 12 per cent of UK households were food insecure in January 2026, about 6.3 million adults, up from 11 per cent in June 2025. Among food-insecure households, 53 per cent had cut back on fruit and 40 per cent on vegetables in the previous month. When money runs short, fresh food is the first thing to go, and for someone managing a chronic condition, a diet pushed toward cheap, ultra-processed food is not a small loss.

Why a benefits review is the reason this is news now

The timing matters. In early July 2026 an interim UK government review of the Personal Independence Payment, the main benefit for extra disability costs, concluded that the system for deciding eligibility was not fit for purpose and described it in blunt terms. The headline finding, that these benefits act as a barrier to moving into work, is the one drawing attention, and it points at a real tension.

Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts numbers on it: almost three in four recipients of work-related disability benefits said fear of losing those benefits was a significant barrier to work. People are not choosing benefits over work so much as protecting themselves against a system that can leave them worse off if a job does not last. Anti-poverty charity Trussell has warned that welfare-reform proposals risk pushing about 440,000 people in households with a disability into severe hardship by the end of the decade, the kind of hardship that ends at a food bank door. Disability Rights UK notes that most food-bank users in the UK are people with disabilities.

So there are two stories running at once. One says the benefit rules trap people out of work. The other says the payments are already too low to keep food on the table. Both can be true, and which one a government acts on first will decide who gets protected.

What actually drives it

Food insecurity at these rates is not about budgeting. It is about income and cost pressing from both sides.

On income, the employment rate for people with a disability in the UK sits at 52.6 per cent against 82.5 per cent for people without one, and those in work are more likely to hold insecure jobs. The Resolution Foundation has found household income for adults with a disability averages around 30 per cent lower than for those without, even counting disability payments.

On cost, the extra expenses of disability squeeze whatever food budget remains. The charity Scope puts a figure on it. Its Disability Price Tag 2025 finds that households with a disability need an extra £1,095 a month just to reach the same standard of living as households without one: higher heating, running medical equipment, extra laundry. Scope also sets that against the benefit meant to cover it. The average Personal Independence Payment is £465 a month per household, leaving a shortfall of £630 every month, which is the adequacy argument in a single number. There are also plainer barriers that have nothing to do with money, such as getting to a shop, moving through it, or preparing a meal at all. One person quoted in the Food Foundation’s briefing described relying on a microwave because bending to an oven was too hard, and eating less as a result.

What people are calling for

The Food Foundation and more than a hundred organizations, Disability Rights UK among them, are backing a proposed Good Food Bill that would set long-term food-system targets in law and treat affordable, nutritious food as a national priority rather than a year-to-year choice. Alongside that, advocates want benefit levels, including Universal Credit and PIP, set against the actual cost of a healthy diet and the added costs a disability brings. The common thread is adequacy: a payment that does not cover essentials is not doing the job it exists to do.

Why Canadians should watch this

The UK debate rhymes with Canada’s. Here too, people with disabilities carry a far heavier share of food insecurity. A Statistics Canada study drawing on the 2021 Canadian Income Survey found people with disabilities had about 2.5 times higher odds of living in a food-insecure household than those without, even after accounting for income and other factors. That was before the sharp national rise since: PROOF at the University of Toronto reports that food insecurity has climbed to affect roughly a quarter of people in the ten provinces.

The policy parallel is closer still. The Canada Disability Benefit, which began rolling out in 2025, tops out well below what disability-poverty advocates argued was needed, and provincial income programs vary widely in how far they stretch. The same two arguments the UK is now weighing, whether benefit design discourages work and whether payments are simply too low, are the arguments shaping disability income in Canada right now. Watching how Britain resolves the tension, and who pays if it resolves it badly, is worth doing from here.

Living Unlimited writes for people with disabilities living full lives. When the food budget is the first thing to give, that is a policy question as much as a personal one, and it is being decided on both sides of the Atlantic.

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