The scheme, which offers prepaid cards to people who are 10 weeks pregnant or have a child under four to help them afford healthy food, reached just 64 per cent of those eligible by the end of March.
The proportion of people accessing the scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is also lower than the uptake of Scotland’s equivalent scheme, Best Start Foods, which had an 88 per cent access rate in 2021/22.
The analysis of Healthy Start data comes alongside new research from The Food Foundation, which found that the food insecurity rate for households with children under the age of four is 27 per cent, which is higher than rates in households with only school-age children or no children.
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