The Trussell Trust has said it fears UK food banks will experience their busiest ever summer in 2019.

A huge 87,496 food parcels went to children in the UK in summer 2018 – a 20% increase on the previous summer, and the charity expects this trend to continue.

The trust said that more than a third of all emergency food parcels distributed by food banks in the its network go to children, and that extra holiday-time financial pressure placed on families who are entitled to free school meals during term time would fuel the rise.

The total number of food parcels handed out to children and adults between 1 July and 31 August last year was 240,000. The areas that received the most food packages in 2018 were the North West (24,000), London (17,000) and East of England (16,000).

To combat UK hunger, the charity is calling for the government to end the five-week wait for universal credit payments.

Emma Revie, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, said: “Food banks will do all they can to help families over the summer, with many running holiday clubs to support parents who find that their income simply won’t stretch to meet the extra pressure of missing free school meals or paying for additional childcare during the holidays.

“But no charity can replace the dignity of having enough money for the basics.”

Three-quarters of support professionals such as health visitors and social workers said they had seen an increase in the numbers of families they regularly worked with who experienced destitution and were in need of basic financial support.

Despite more families facing greater difficulties, official support was harder to come by, the survey found. “The only substantive increase in support over the last year was the increase in the number of families support workers have seen using food banks,” it read.

The survey of 1,290 frontline family support workers from 616 organisations across the UK was published by the poverty grants charity Buttle UK. It said it was undertaken to provide a “thermometer reading” of the lives of some the UK’s most vulnerable families.

It comes amid rising concern that alongside headline increases in relative poverty in recent years – more than 4 million children in the UK live below the breadline – a cohort of the very poorest families is experiencing the extreme and intractable form of poverty known as destitution.

Destitution is defined as experience of at least two of six measures over the previous month, including eating fewer than two meals a day for two or more days; or as a weekly income after housing costs of £70 for a single adult or £140 for a couple with children – an amount below which people “cannot meet their core material needs for basic physiological functioning from their own resources”.