Holiday hunger is on the rise as life expectancy stalls.

The number of children experiencing ‘holiday hunger', not having access to enough food during the long summer holiday is getting worse according to the findings of a survey reported in the Times Educational Supplement (TES).

The survey was carried out by the National Education Union (NEU) and polled 657 members, 59% of whom said they had seen children coming back to school after the long break ‘looking visibly less well nourished'. A direct consequence of their families not being able to afford to buy enough food.

The members questioned said the problem had got worse in the past couple of years (51%) and more than half said (59%) said support in and out of school for struggling families was not enough to meet demand.

NEU chief executive Ros McNeil told the TES that ‘such extensive poverty simply should not exist in a county with the world’s fifth largest economy', adding that charities and faith groups were ‘left to pick up the pieces where the government has failed'.

Also speaking to the TES children and families minister Nadhim Zahawi said the government wanted ‘every child to have the best chances in life and since 2010 there are 300,000 fewer children living in absolute poverty'.

He drew attention to the £2million the government had made available to be spent providing free meals for struggling families during the school holidays.

Ms McNeil said the extra money was ‘welcome’ but ‘nowhere near enough to tackle the desperate plight of families and children'.

The NEU survey comes hard on the heels of data from the Office for National Statistics showing that the rate at which life expectancy in the UK is slowing down for the first time in decades.

It has fallen from 12.9 weeks a year for women in 2006/11 to 1.2 weeks in 2011/12, and for men from 17.3 weeks to 4.2 weeks over the same period.

Sir Steve Webb, former Liberal Democrat pensions minister and director of policy at insurer Royal London, told the BBC that the UK had ‘slumped from being one of the strongest performers when it comes to improving life expectancy to bottom of the league'.

Adding that ‘there is a real human cost behind these statistics and we urgently need to understand more about why this is happening'.

Figures from the Citizens Advice Bureau published in The Independent recently show household debt ballooning to £19billion with council tax and utilities costs making up the lion’s share of the burden. The Chartered Institute of Housing have also reported that the poorest families living in private rented accommodation face a shortfall of £140 per month thanks to the four-year freeze on housing benefits (source: The Guardian).

There is no question that families on low and increasingly what used to be thought of a modest but adequate income, are caught at the centre of a perfect storm. Debt, poverty and destitution go together to make a grim progress matching anything created by Hogarth. Only they are driven down this route by circumstances outside their control rather than bad choices or moral weakness.

The idea of children going hungry during the holidays or at any other time in a rich country with pretentions to be a world power seems like something belonging to the world of my parent’s childhood in the thirties; not the Britain of the twenty first century. Yet that and worse is the awful reality faced by over a million people.

No wonder life expectancy is stalling, it may soon start to decline, and the fault can be laid nowhere else other than at the door of the government. Since 2010 they have pursued austerity policies that have done huge damage to the most vulnerable members of society.

There is a scene in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a book often read as a twee fantasy rather than an alarming social allegory, where Scrooge is shown two starving children, the Ghost of Christmas Present thunders at him that ‘written on their foreheads is that which is doom!’

Cut out the Victorian bombast and you can’t help wondering what the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come might show Mrs May and her government, if she stopped dancing long enough to listen. My guess is it would be a riff on the same theme, only played in a darker tone.

When a country’s life expectancy starts to go into reverse and its children go hungry it is a symptom of deep-seated social problems. The sort that no amount of pomp and circumstance, or nostalgia for a misremembered past can hide.

When that same country is on the brink of taking a political and economic leap into the dark; it has that makings of a recipe for disaster.