Three years ago the Scottish Government pledged to end the need for food banks in Scotland, but there was no mention of this in yesterday’s announcements.

Every week the Edinburgh Food Project continues to hand out hundreds of emergency food parcels to people who would otherwise go hungry. We urgently need more political focus on getting people in crisis access to cash and fixing the social security system so that vulnerable people are not left for weeks and months with no money at all.

We warmly welcome the commitments to invest in the Scottish Child Payment and roll out school breakfast clubs, because no child should go to school hungry.

But the fact that the Scottish Government has stopped mentioning food banks at all in their strategies to address poverty shows a terrible complacency.

Food banks are becoming more and more institutionalised. People arrive at our sessions and tell us they’ve eaten nothing for days. These realities are far from the ambitions for modern Scotland the First Minister set out yesterday.

We need urgent action to ensure that neither adults nor children are forced to rely on hand outs to avoid going hungry.