Ian Byrne: 'Hunger is a political choice'
Photo byShortly after Labour's landslide victory at the general election in July 2024, the party removed the whip from seven of its MPs. All seven had voted for an amendment to the King's Speech tabled by the SNP, which would have removed the two-child benefit cap. Among the seven was Ian Byrne, the 52-year-old MP for Liverpool West Derby, a former trade union organiser and previously the office manager for fellow Liverpool Labour MP, Dan Carden.
Byrne was first elected to parliament in 2019 and was re-elected in 2024 (although with a decreased majority). In August, he had the whip reinstated alongside four others in the group, including fellow Corbyn-aligned leftwingers Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey. When I met Byrne at his parliamentary offices on a bright morning in March, he calmly reiterated his opposition to the two-child cap: 'We won't solve the issue of child poverty without removing it.' For Byrne, tackling child poverty has become a driving mission, so he felt he couldn't turn his back on it that day in the Commons chamber. This mission has deep roots. Before he was elected to parliament, Byrne was employed by Unite, helping organise sub-contracted NHS workers for better pay and conditions. One morning, he and his colleague, Dave Kelly, visited a community centre 'a stone's throw away from Anfield', near to where Byrne (a lifelong Liverpool fan) was living. On his way into the community centre, Byrne saw a group of people in a queue. 'I didn't know what they were queuing up for,' he told me, 'I realised it was for a food bank.'
When Byrne looked closer, he saw that there were people he knew in the queue. Though the charity was run on generous donations from locals, the community was struggling. This is reflected in the data. Liverpool is the third most deprived local authority area in England: 63 per cent of its residents live in places that are ranked among the most deprived in England. Three in ten children in the city live in poverty.
After seeing people he knew in the queue to access provisions at the food bank, Byrne couldn't sleep that night. 'I felt ashamed of myself that I didn't realise the extent of what we were actually seeing,' he said.
The scale of this emergency is stark; and it is growing. According to data from the Department for Work and Pensions, in 2022-23, 2.3 million people lived in a household that had used a food bank in the past 12 months. Between 2017-18 and 2023-24, the number of emergency food parcels handed out by the Trussell Trust more than doubled, from 1.4 million to 3.1 million.
A night of tossing and turning moulded an idea, and the next morning, Byrne immediately got in touch with Kelly (an Everton supporter) to start moving. 'I got in touch with Dave and said, maybe we utilise the power of the supporters – we're so close to Anfield and Goodison [Park],' Byrne told me. His plan was to harness the support of the 60,000 Liverpool and 40,000 Everton supporters who descend on the same L4 postcode to watch the two teams play. Their plan was to ask supporters to contribute food or other supplies that would then be redistributed across the city. As fans of the game will know, to have founded a charity that brings together these two ultra-rivals (Liverpool and Everton) is no mean feat.
At the teams' next matches, Byrne and Kelly rocked up outside each stadium with wheelie bins, into which fans were encouraged to donate items of food and other essentials. And so, Fans Supporting Foodbanks was born. 'We haven't missed a match at Liverpool and Everton since 2015,' Byrne told me. The initiative has proliferated in the decade since its conception. The team have upgraded from their humble wheelie-bin beginnings and now station trucks outside Anfield and Goodison Park, and are there 'three hours before kick-off at every game, asking fans to contribute through donations of food', Byrne said.
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Those donations support the eight food pantries that are run by Fans Supporting Foodbanks across Liverpool, which the charity has set up to look like farmer's markets. Byrne explained that this is to free them from stigma. 'Food banks are appalling places,' he said. 'The services the volunteers give are magnificent. But it was just so demeaning for the people accessing them. You could see they were defeated before they went in.' By putting more thought into what the food banks could be, or offer to the local community, their influence grew. 'A lot of people go now for the camaraderie as well as the food. It's a place where they feel comfortable, and they feel welcomed. I think that's really important,' Byrne said.
Byrne was born in 1972 in Liverpool and grew up on the Stockbridge Village Estate in Knowsley, then known as Cantril Farm. In the 1980s, the estate became synonymous with deprivation and unemployment (the rate was almost 50 per cent for men and 80 per cent for young people after the north-west was particularly hard hit by deindustrialisation). In 1989, when he was 16, Byrne was present at the Hillsborough disaster, the fatal crowd crush which caused the deaths of 97 people. In the following weeks, the police passed false stories to the press that suggested that the incident had been caused by football hooligans and drunkenness among Liverpool FC supporters. Byrne's father was injured in the crush. 'Being at Hillsborough and witnessing the injustice, I think that's why I'm here today,' Byrne said. 'I think that's why I went into the trade union movement and why I got into community activism.' He added: 'You're seeing injustice everywhere and you think, well, what can I do to assist and make change for the better?'
With the arrival of a Labour government, Byrne sees an opportunity to resolve this crisis. 'We've got an unbelievable mandate to tackle the issues and that is, for me, what the Labour party was set up to do.' Instituting a Right to Food is top of his requests, as is removing the two-child benefit cap. But he is adamant there cannot be a return to austerity. 'I look at how my city and constituency have been decimated after 15 years of austerity. People can't take it any more. There's nothing more to give.'
Indeed, Byrne is worried that if people do not see a tangible improvement in their living standards, Labour risks opening the door to something else coming down the line – namely, Reform. 'People will think, well, I've given the Tories a chance. They've done nothing for me. The Labour Party, we've given them a chance. If they've done nothing for five years, they could quite easily turn to someone like Nigel Farage,' Byrne told me. 'He's got no idea how people live in my community. Nor does he care. But people will go down that path,' he warned.
How can Labour stop that from happening? 'There's got to be ambition,' Byrne said. 'Hunger is a political choice, and it's only when you get into this place that you understand how easy it is for the levers of power to actually make decisions like that,' he added. 'It should encompass all wings of every party: it should be tackled with ferocity'.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight on Child Poverty supplement, of 23 May 2025, guest edited by Gordon Brown.
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