You're still ignoring the fact that the victims in all of this are the children. There obviously is a deeper problem with bad parenting that can exacerbate the problem of hungry kids, but there are also responsible parents who struggle to feed their kids nutritious meals. Things like saying 'you can buy cheese and crackers for 40p a meal, and throw in the occassional hotdog. so just stretch your budget so it's calorie-rich and nutrient poor, but at least your kid won't starve' doesn't help because you can't live a healthy life with such an unabalanced diet.

Also, putting in a system that can properly identify when parents are mis-spending their pittance, even if that were possible, is going to cost the taxpayer more and would be very intrusive besides, and also would take time. It's not like there's a bunch of social workers sitting around with nothing to do all day, so let's put them in charge of auditing how everyone on benefits spends their money. You'd have to hire a lot more people and then hope no-one buys anything with cash so you can track their purchases. Aside from the Big Brother aspect of it, it just isn't practical and it also doesn't address what is happening right now, this week, with kids going hungry.

There's an immediate problem right now that can be solved with a few million quid. We can look for ways to solve the more difficult problems starting next week if we want, and we should.