That this House has considered the provision of free school meals.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Betts.
A child pretending to eat out of an empty lunchbox because they do not qualify for free school meals and do not want their friends to know that there is no food at home; a child coming into school having not eaten anything since lunch the day before, so hungry that they are eating rubbers at school; and a child hiding in the playground because they do not think they can get a meal—all stories from schools in England today. This has to stop.
I want every child at school to be happy, healthy and ready to learn, and I doubt that anybody here would disagree on that point. That is why it was the Liberal Democrats in government who introduced free school meals for every infant schoolchild—something of which I am incredibly proud. Since the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014, it has been required by law that free lunches are provided to all pupils in reception, year 1 and year 2. That universal offering for all infants has paid real dividends. A free school meal can be life changing; its benefits are enormous.
Extending free school meals offers a triple whammy of benefits. Free school meals save parents time and money, as parents save an average of £10 a week on food and 50 minutes a week preparing it. They improve educational outcomes; when free school meals for children aged five to seven were piloted in east London and Durham, pupils made around two months more progress in their SATs results compared with those in the rest of the country. They help children to eat more healthily: packed lunches are much more likely than school meals to provide more calories from fat, sodium and sugar. When free infant school meals were rolled out, two in five headteachers told the Education Policy Institute that healthy eating across the school had improved. Free school meals are incredible, and we should give one to every child living in poverty, whether in primary or secondary school, because hunger and poverty do not stop at the age of 11.
Not only does a free school meal make sense for the reasons I have already outlined; it also makes financial sense. An analysis by PwC found that every £1 spent on free school meals for the poorest children generates £1.38 in core benefits, including a boost to the lifetime earnings of those children by almost £3 billion. Free school meals are a simple, unintrusive way of ensuring that all children from low-income families have at least one well-balanced, healthy, nutritious meal a day. The Government know this, having already extended free school meals to children without recourse to public funds during the pandemic, before making that extension permanent. Even the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), told a Conservative party conference fringe event that he supported extending free school meals to all children in poverty. Doing nothing is economically, morally and politically unsustainable.
As quite a lot of Members wish to speak, the Front Benchers have kindly agreed to keep their contributions to eight minutes, which means that I can allow six minutes to Back-Bench Members. That is advisory, but please do not go over; if Members go over that limit, I will start to intervene to keep us to it.
4:43 pm
Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
Diolch yn fawr, Mr Betts, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing the debate.
I believe that access to sufficient, nutritious food is a basic right. It is essential to the development and growth of our children—our future generations—and the provision of free school meals is fundamentally important to that. Guaranteeing children at least one hot, healthy meal a day is a vital way of enabling young people to develop, and there is strong evidence that it improves their health and wellbeing, their academic performance and our economic prosperity as a country. The Government like to say that they have increased free school meal provision, but the low household income threshold of £7,400 means that close to 1 million children living in poverty in England are not eligible for the Government’s free school meals scheme. Furthermore, as the National Education Union highlights, the divisions inherent in a means-tested system mean that stigma remains a barrier to accessing free school meals, even for parents who are aware of their children’s entitlement. It has been estimated that as many as 215,000 eligible children missed out in 2020. As well as being in the interests of children and their families, expanding free school meal provision makes sense economically. Research conducted by PwC has found that expanding free school meal eligibility in line with universal credit has economic benefits.
I am proud to say that in Wales we are leading the way in many regards—alongside the other devolved nations, I hasten to add. I have been fortunate to be involved in a grassroots campaign that has led to free school meals being provided in all primary schools in Wales. That is part of the co-operation agreement between Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru. As of last month, all primary school children in Wales, including in my constituency of Cynon Valley, are receiving free school meals.
It is time for England to catch up. I commend the campaign work that the Food Foundation has done through its Nourishing the Nation campaign. I also commend the NEU’s Free School Meals for All campaign. I thank them for their briefings ahead of the debate today. England can start to catch up with Wales by ensuring that at least the 900,000 children living in poverty who do not have access to free school meals can have that.
We can do a lot more, including in Wales, and I want to mention the excellent work that the Bevan Foundation has recently been doing on provision for those currently subject to no recourse to public funds. Eligibility assessments for children rely on receipt of benefits that parents subject to no recourse conditions cannot access, so Welsh Government guidance encourages local authorities to exercise their discretion where children are affected by no recourse. However, many children from low-income households are not entitled to free school meals, so the Bevan Foundation recommends that the Welsh Government introduce automatic eligibility for free school meals for those children, and England should be doing that as well.
I, too, am very pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing this very welcome debate.
In 2022-23, 30% of children were in poverty after housing costs. That is 4.3 million children, the highest number since 1998-99, reversing all the progress that had been made in the years following that time. The Government’s family resources survey found that one 10th of all households and 15% of households with children were food insecure; that is the Government’s own data. The Food Foundation has been mentioned by both previous speakers. Using a different methodology, taken from the USA’s food security survey model, it found that 17% of all households and 23.4% of households with children were either moderately or severely food insecure in June 2023. Those figures make it absolutely clear that child poverty in the UK is much too high. We are limiting our future potential by keeping it at this high level. The most immediate benefit of free school meals is tackling the scourge of child poverty.
As we have heard, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, a third of school-age children in poverty are missing out on free school meals at the moment. Free school meals are provided to children with parents in receipt of a number of benefits, most importantly universal credit, but only if their household income is less than £7,400 a year. That threshold has not been uprated in six years. I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that, because it ought to be uprated annually, along with other benefits. The Government estimate that, once other social security income is considered, the threshold equates to a total household income for those families of around £18,000 to £24,000, but that is below what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that a single person needs for a minimum acceptable living standard, let alone a couple with children.
We have heard about the cost-benefit analysis produced by PwC on extending free school meals to all those who claim universal credit. The analysis took account of research from Sweden to the Department for Education, and from the Association for Young People’s Health to Ofsted, showing that free school meals reduce obesity and absenteeism, improve academic attainment and raise lifetime earnings. Those are all advantages that we need to capture.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for the work they do in this area.
Newham has been a pioneer in universal free school meals for over a decade now, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) has described. As has been mentioned, 900,000 children in England live in poverty but are not eligible for free school meals. Many of those children may well live in Newham, but thankfully at primary schools in our area they receive that important hot and healthy meal, even though the Government’s criteria seems to suggest that they do not deserve it. I continue to believe that our local universal free school meal offer is so important for child welfare because so many families in our communities are enduring hardship, thanks to incomes that simply do not pay the bills and a massive shortage of decent affordable homes.
We have the second highest child poverty rate in the country and the highest homelessness rate. More than 8,500 children in Newham are growing up in temporary accommodation, which is often damp, cold and mouldy—awful conditions. Last week, we learned that across the country that statistic has risen by 15%. Our families, whether they are technically in poverty or not, and whether they can pay their rent or are struggling to do so, have been massively impacted by the cost of living crisis over the past years. That has increased child hunger and stress caused by financial worries to simply appalling levels. The rise in child hardship and child homelessness makes that one free school meal a day all the more essential—sometimes it is that child’s only meal.
Teachers I speak to locally tell me ever-worse stories of how children are coming in hungry day after day and the strategies the children use to hide it. A hot decent lunch is a lifeline that helps children concentrate. It makes school the haven it should be, away from the stress and worry that often awaits them at home. But rising homelessness costs to the council create risk for Newham’s new universal free school meal programme. Without support, it could become less and less affordable, even as the need for it grows higher and higher. That is because just a fraction of free school meals in Newham are paid for by this Government, who have done so much to increase need by driving down council funding, eroding our stock of social homes and cutting family incomes from social security.
I am delighted to participate in the debate as a former recipient of free school meals. I know how important they are to support learning and attainment for children. I am extremely proud that in Scotland we have the most generous free school meal provision anywhere in the UK by some significant distance, with universal provision for all pupils in primary 1 to 5 and eligible pupils who are older. Last year, free school meal provision helped feed 231,967 children. With 29% of children in my constituency of North Ayrshire and Arran living in poverty, free school meals could not matter more.
Despite our progress, however, we in Scotland are not content. We are going to expand free school meals to all primary children, and that is actively in the works. The Scottish Government is working with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to prepare primary schools and their infrastructure for a full, universal roll-out of free school meals for all primary children, which should be completed in 2026. That is supported by £43 million in capital from the Scottish Government in 2024-25 and an additional £6 million in resource spending, with local authorities benefiting from £21.7 million allocated to support eligible children during the school holidays. This support saves families £400 per year and far outstrips the free school meal offers in any other part of the UK. That matters, because hungry children do not learn. Ensuring that children receive a nutritious free school meal is therefore a fundamental part of supporting attainment. How could it not be?
By contrast, the incoming Labour Government have ruled out universal free school meals despite previous commitments to that, just as so many of Labour’s commitments have been dropped the more certain it becomes of forming the next Government. You would not know this from the comments made today, but in a matter of months we can be pretty sure that there will be a Labour Government with a significant majority, and we know, because we have been told, that there will be no movement on free school meals.
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I want to thank the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) for securing today’s debate and for her excellent opening speech setting the scene. The topic of school food—and specifically free school meals—has been an incredibly important one for me throughout my parliamentary career. In fact, I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on school food, which I set up in 2010, and I am pleased to say that a number of colleagues here today are also very important members.
As we have heard, in the UK our devolved nations each have their own individual free school meal offers. In Scotland, all primary school children, regardless of family income, are eligible for free school meals and all secondary school students are subject to a means-tested offer. In Wales, all children who attend mainstream primary schools are eligible for a free school meal. In Northern Ireland there is no universal offer; however, the eligibility criteria for the means-tested offer includes families with an annual taxable income of up to £16,190 or net earnings of under £14,000 a year, which is almost twice as high as the same offer in England, and means that around 30% of the entire school population are eligible. The levels of poverty across the north-east, and indeed in other parts of England, are the same as in Northern Ireland, and yet such different levels of means-testing are used. That is just unfair.
In England, all children in reception, year 1 and year 2 currently receive a hot, healthy meal each day. Universal infant free school meals is a policy I am very proud of, having worked with Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent on the school food plan that helped convince them to put universal primary free school meals as one of their recommendations, which, as we heard, the former Deputy Prime Minister then enacted when they were in the coalition Government, which I think we are all very happy still exists to this day—the free school meals, not the coalition Government! However, from year 3 onwards, provision of free school meals is means-tested. Only children in households in England who receive universal credit and earn less than £7,400—excluding benefit payments—are eligible for free school meals. On that note, in today’s short speech I will focus on how we must change the policy in England. For too long, England has been the poor relation. It is just not good enough. We have the least generous offers around school food, and the highest rates of children in poverty who are ineligible for free school meals.
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. Thank you to the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) for securing this important debate. I echo her praise for the fantastic campaign victory of Natalie Hay and Contact, for disabled children, their parents and guardians.
I start by sharing the words of the children of Monksdown Primary School in West Derby, who wrote to the Prime Minister last year to ask him to offer free school meals for all pupils. One pupil wrote:
I am writing to you because I believe all children deserve free school meals. The inflation over the past few months means some people have been starving at school because of the cost of living…so some parents have not had enough to get school meals.”
Another pupil wrote:
“Parents might not have the money to pay for food for you. If your brain is hungry, you will feel unhappy and tired.”
Another pupil wrote:
“We don’t have a choice to go to school because it’s the law but we have to pay for lunch.”
Adam Gidwitz once wrote:
“There is a wisdom in children, a kind of knowing, a kind of believing, that we, as adults, do not have.”
It has been almost a year since the children wrote to the Prime Minister, who unfortunately does not have that wisdom. Imagine the difference that would have made for families with their children’s education, health and happiness if he had listened to the children at our primary and introduced free school meals like they asked.
Last year, over 4 million children experienced food insecurity, not having access to nutritious and balanced meals or having to skip meals. That includes many thousands in my constituency, where the relative child poverty rate is significantly higher than national averages and where, as a city, one in three people are in food poverty. This is devastating for children and families in West Derby and Liverpool, including the many who are hungry and do not fall beneath the Government’s restrictively-low household income threshold of £7,400 to be eligible for free school meals. They are among the 900,000 children nationally who are below the poverty line yet still do not qualify.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts.
We have heard how 900,000 children from low-income families are not in receipt of free school meals and about the adequacy of what many children are receiving, not least if they take a packed lunch—they are not being nutritiously fed throughout the day. In fact, only 1% of packed lunches reach nutritional standards. In York, that is very much the case. We have about 4,000 children who are entitled to be in receipt of free school meals, but only about 3,000—about 75%—actually receiving them, because we do not have auto-enrolment. I urge the Government to join up the data so that we see eligibility following through to receipt of free school meals. It can be done, it must be done, and it will ensure that those families are well served.
I want to talk in particular about York Hungry Minds. York has the lowest-funded upper-tier local authority in the country, yet, as a Right to Food city, it prioritised feeding hungry children when Labour came to power in the council last May. City of York Council put the first £100,000 into Two Ridings Community Foundation as a vehicle for sourcing and independently funding the programme. It then called for city partners, including in industry and business, as well as individuals from the community, to boost that fund.
The pilot that York is engaged in is based in two schools: Westfield, where there are already far better healthy lunch choices for the children at key stage 2; and Burton Green, which is investing in breakfast for children. The results are already incredible. Starting in January this year, the research piece by the University of York will follow the pilot through to the end of the year. Researchers are already seeing an improvement in attendance—an issue that the Government are wrestling with at the moment—and far better engagement in learning. These are the early seeds of what it means to have a full stomach and to be able to work in such an environment.
One of the reasons that John Vincent and Henry Dimbleby, who authored the school food plan, said that they included recommendation 17 on universal free primary school meals is that, when they looked at the evidence, the children who improved the most when all the boats rose were those who were already entitled to free school meals. The only thing that had been removed was the stigma. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is very important?
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There has been some progress. My party and I welcomed the extension of free school meals to every primary school child in London by the Mayor of London in 2023. I am sure that all hon. Members will agree that a proper analysis of that scheme and its outcomes will be critical, and I look forward to seeing the Education Endowment Foundation’s report in due course. I hope that that work will inform both this Government’s and any future Government’s policymaking on free school meals.
The Mayor’s commitment to free school meals is admirable, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that earlier in this Parliament the Labour party chose not to support extending free school meals to all children in poverty. When the Liberal Democrats tabled an amendment to the Schools Bill in the other place to that effect, Labour peers sadly chose to abstain. Although there was much in the Bill I disliked, I was disappointed that we were not able to press the same amendment to a vote in the Commons. I hope and expect that many hon. Members here would have felt able to support it had we secured that opportunity.
Regarding the Conservative record, I am sure that many hon. Members will recall that Marcus Rashford had to drag this Government kicking and screaming to provide free school meals in the school holidays during covid. They may also recall some of the comments that were expressed from the Government Benches in debates at the time, such as:
“Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children? I do not believe in nationalising children. Instead, we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility”—[Official Report, 21 October 2020; Vol. 682, c. 1155.]
or,
“‘it’s a parent’s job to feed their children’”. —[Official Report, 21 October 2020; Vol. 682, c. 1160.]
Frankly, that is an insult to every parent who cannot afford to feed their child. Of course, we all agree that it is a parent’s job to feed their children; that is exactly what almost every parent is desperately trying to do.
Indeed, I met a mother at one of my constituency surgeries who had fled an abusive partner. She was skipping her mental health medication because she needed to use the money that she would have spent on prescriptions to ensure that her daughter could eat lunch at college. That is a mother taking her responsibility to feed her child seriously, and she is paying the price with her health and wellbeing. I am afraid that the Conservative Government are forcing parents to make impossible choices such as that. It is a scandal that a free school meal may be the only hot meal that a child eats in a day in this country. In a country such as England, families are struggling with this basic human need, and it is appalling. The Government should hang their head in shame.
Children are going hungry. In January 2024, the Food Foundation’s latest tracking found that 20% of households with children reported experiencing food insecurity. Given those statistics, it is not surprising that the use of food banks has skyrocketed. Three per cent of all individuals in the UK used a food bank in the financial year ending 2022, and there are over 2,500 food banks operating in the UK.
Giving children in poverty a free school meal gives them the energy to learn in the afternoon and it saves parents money. When children go hungry, they make less progress, and have poorer behaviour and worse health outcomes. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, more than 4 million children in the UK are living in poverty. That means that in an average classroom of 30, nine children will be living in poverty. It also calculates that 900,000 children—a third of school-age children living in poverty in England—miss out on free school meals. The £7,400 earnings threshold has not increased since it was introduced in 2018, but if it had risen in line with inflation it should be around £9,300.
Parents are trapped in poverty by a system that punishes them for working more hours. When universal credit was introduced in 2010, the Government promised that people would be better off for each hour they worked and for every pound they earned, but under the Conservatives that is no longer true. If someone is earning just under the £7,400 limit, taking on extra hours or getting a pay rise could make them worse off, as their children would lose free school meals, and if someone is earning just over the limit, they could be better off taking a pay cut. Surely that is nonsense.
Not only must we feed more children in poverty who are currently not eligible for free school meals; we must also make changes to ensure that every single child who is entitled to a free school meal takes one up. In 2013, the Department for Education estimated that around 14% of pupils entitled to free school meals were not claiming them. The DFE does not routinely collect information on the number of pupils who are entitled to free school meals but do not make a claim. It is therefore largely unknown how many children are not currently receiving the benefit, but it is estimated that around one in 10 pupils eligible for free school meals in England are not registered, so are missing out. The kicker is that as well as these children missing out on their meal, schools are unable to claim the pupil premium and other important disadvantage funding that goes with it. I commend the work of the FixOurFood programme, led by the University of York together with the Food Foundation, which has set out to test and evaluate the Sheffield model of opt-out automatic enrolment with at least 20 local authorities. Auto-enrolment is an important step on which I would welcome movement from the Government.
Free school meals cannot and should not be produced from cheap, substandard ingredients. We have all seen pictures of frankly disgusting-looking school meals in some of our national papers. Although Jamie Oliver has pushed the Government to improve the nutritional quality of our school meals, there is still more work to be done, but I am afraid that the root of these problems is money. I appreciate that there are some hon. Members in this place who think it is possible to provide a meal for an entire family for just 30p a day, but those of us living in the real world are aware that food inflation has been particularly pernicious. We all know that funding for free school meals has not kept up with inflation. The national funding formula value for free school meals in the 2023-24 financial year is £480 per pupil—up just £10 from the previous year—yet food prices have risen by 15%.
Funding increases for universal infant free school meals would have been laughable had the matter not been so serious. The increases have been pitiful. In 2020, the funding rate for universal infant free school meals was increased by just 7p per pupil, and that increase was only the second since the policy was first introduced in 2014. The first increase was just 4p; overall, that is an increase of just 11p in universal infant free school meals since 2014. The economy has taken a hammering and inflation has been sky high, but infant free school meals have got just 11p—not even enough for a lettuce. The resulting shortfalls and cuts to other parts of the school budget mean that children are losing out, or higher prices are being paid by parents of junior pupils who pay for their meals.
Finally, I pay tribute to the successful campaign led by my constituent Natalie Hay on changing free school meal guidance for disabled children, who have been let down. They have often been excluded from free school meal provision because they cannot physically attend school. They may be waiting for a placement at a specialist school or may not be able to eat the school meal provided due to dietary requirements or sensory processing difficulties. Instead of getting a supermarket voucher so that an alternative meal can be provided, these children are often forgotten. Thanks to Natalie’s tenacity in fighting the system, with the support of the charity Contact and CrowdJustice, the legal guidance in this area has gone from just three pages to 19, including food vouchers as an acceptable adjustment. I hope that other families will not face the same prejudice and discrimination that Natalie and her son did.
In conclusion, the Government’s adviser on the national food strategy, Henry Dimbleby, said:
“Hungry children cannot learn and cannot thrive. It is unconscionable in 2022 that this situation has not yet been addressed.”
We are now in 2024 and nothing has changed. Teachers are increasingly having to act as a fourth emergency service, consuming so much time, energy and resources dealing with these issues beyond the school gates, including hunger. Extending free school meals is one way that we can restore the support network around our young people by ensuring that they have at least one hot, cooked meal a day, giving them the energy to learn in the afternoon. No child should go hungry at school. The Liberal Democrats would extend free school meals, beginning with every child in poverty, to save parents money, encourage healthy eating and give children the energy to learn. It is a no-brainer.
To go further, I passionately believe that free school meals should be an entitlement for all children and young people. I started by saying that access to sufficient nutritious food is a basic right, so ensuring that every woman, man and child has a right to nutritious food should be enshrined in law.
I want to finish by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) and thanking him for the sterling work that he is doing. My colleague and friend is working tirelessly in demanding that the right to food be enshrined in law, and I am pleased that I am able to support that. We can afford it. We are the fifth—the fifth—richest nation in the world and we could introduce a wealth tax and end tax evasion and avoidance by the rich.
There is another way, and we have to start getting our priorities right as a country. I am determined to continue to work in collaboration with colleagues in this House but also, crucially, with grassroots organisations and individuals to end the scourge of child poverty.
The hon. Member for Twickenham referred to the 2009 pilot in the London Borough of Newham. I am pleased to be one of the Members of Parliament who represent that borough, and I am glad to see my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Ms Brown) in her place today. The assessment of the pilot showed that it led to improvements in classroom behaviour, concentration and attainment. Parents also reported that their children were more willing to eat healthily at home. I am pleased to say that Newham has continued to provide free school meals to all primary school pupils ever since, defying waves of Government austerity in the last 15 years. I want to pay tribute to the impressive commitment of my colleagues on Newham Council to maintaining that very important provision. I also pay tribute to Juniper, the council-owned company that provides the meals and is very well-known to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who works with it each year at a free school meals event.
Last year the Mayor of London provided funding to help all London boroughs follow suit, and I very much applaud that decision. It is a very popular policy and no doubt one of the reasons for his welcome re-election last week. Now that he has been re-elected, provision across London is thankfully secure for the next four years. Richard Parker and Kim McGuinness, the new Mayors in the West Midlands and the North East, have committed to moving in that direction too.
Free school meals help alleviate poverty and improve children’s health and educational attainment. Let us use this lever much more widely to tackle the scourge of child poverty.
Our Newham programme has always been paid for by local people through our council budget and, in recent years, by our Mayor of London. Thankfully, that should continue following Sadiq Khan’s victory at the weekend, which ended the financial threat posed by the Conservative candidate. For Newham, widening national eligibility for free school meals would have a double impact on child poverty: it would free up resources to meet the wider needs, including those that have been caused by homelessness. The council and now the Mayor of London would save £6 million a year, which could be reinvested in other services if the free school meals programme was fully funded by the Government.
Healthy free school meals impact on many aspects of our children’s lives and on their opportunities. A University of Essex study, which included Newham, found that families receiving free school meals were saving £37 a month per child and that childhood obesity was reduced by 9.3% for children of reception age. That is obviously important for protecting children’s lifelong health and for reducing costs to the NHS for decades to come, particularly in Newham where almost 30% of year 6 children are affected by obesity.
Even small expansions in eligibility for free school meals are estimated to have economic, social and health benefits. A £1 investment has been found to recoup £1.38 in returns from higher educational achievement, savings to school budgets and reduced NHS costs from obesity. Ultimately, this is a debate about whether we have a Government that are willing to take a long-term view and make an investment in our children that would more than pay for itself in the coming years. Surely that is the kind of investment we need to build a fairer, healthier and more prosperous future for Newham and all our communities.
The arguments that Labour Members have made today to the Minister would be better directed to their own leadership, which refuses to deliver on free school meals. Indeed, that reminds me of the debate we had after the UK Government’s Budget, when Labour MP after Labour MP condemned the Budget and then refused to vote against it. I think that may be what some people call gaslighting.
We cannot leave the matter there because, in a somewhat grotesque development, we have the incoming Labour Government committing to leaving bankers’ bonuses uncapped. That appears to be sacrosanct. So, we appear to be balancing children’s hunger against rich bankers’ bonuses, and that, for the new Labour Government, which we can be pretty sure will be arriving, seems to be the way things are going to be. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Meanwhile in Scotland, we have a Scottish child payment of £26.70 per week per child for the poorest children. The cumulative impact of that, alongside other policies such as free school meals, seems to have reduced child poverty by 10% from what it would otherwise be. In other words, 10% of those children have not fallen into relative poverty as a direct result of those policies. Indeed, the Child Poverty Action Group referred to the Scottish child payment as “a game changer” when it comes to tackling child poverty.
One of the basic tasks of the state is to ensure that every child has access to opportunity, regardless of their family circumstances. Tackling child poverty and child hunger is a fundamental of that. We know that Labour speak with forked tongue on this issue, and frequently so in Scotland. The reality is that when it comes to supporting redistributive policies designed to create a fairer, more equal Scotland, the Labour party in Scotland continues to ape and mimic the lines from Labour in Westminster and fulfil its role as a branch office.
Austerity hits children hardest. People do not like to talk about this, but we suffered austerity under the previous Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and that has only been continued under the Tory Government. We know that it will be embraced yet again by the incoming UK Labour Government. There is no respite from austerity when Westminster is a parcel that is passed between two parties devoid of any so-called vision beyond austerity.
Scotland’s children are faring better because the SNP Scottish Government choose to use their power to support them, and to govern is to choose. Sadly, neither of the Westminster parties today will choose universal free school meals for children. I am proud that in Scotland we are making a different choice for children in Scotland. I fear for the children in England.
We must also think about the quality of the food that we are providing to our students. The school food standards are a fantastic set of regulations that provide guidance on the nutritional quality and variety of food that children should have access to at school. When they are followed correctly, the school meal offers are some of the best in the world, and I work with parliamentarians around the world, so I speak with some authority on this. However, sadly some schools struggle to do so, and they need support. In England there is no consistent assessment, monitoring or reporting of whether schools are meeting the standards for school food. There is no ring-fencing of funding, either. This means that the quality is very variable, with some children benefiting from nutritious, delicious food while others receive lower-quality meals.
We must discuss the structural issues surrounding provision that make delivering school meals unsustainable. For example, as has been talked about already, the funding per meal for universal infant free school meals is far too low. It is just £2.53 across most of England, despite the average meal cost exceeding this. The funding must be raised to £3 per meal to adequately cover the cost of the ingredients and the labour costs for school food. We all eat in restaurants; we know the prices have gone up. Schools are being asked to do an impossible thing at the moment. The rising cost of these meals and the dwindling funding means that, inevitably, quality is going to slip.
We need to revolutionise eligibility. I truly believe that the best school meal offer is a universal free school meal offer, as we have seen with the triumph of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s universal free school meal offer for primary school children in London. It seems popular as well—I think he won, didn’t he? But I understand that the road to a universal offer is a journey. That is why I am calling on the Government to, without delay, expand eligibility to all children whose parents and carers receive universal credit, so that we can begin to tackle the horrifying reality that, as we have heard, 900,000 children living in poverty are currently ineligible, according to the Child Poverty Action Group.
The next step on this road is to implement automatic enrolment as soon as possible. Local authorities like Sheffield are leading the way on this already, and prove it works. Every eligible child should be eligible from day one. This is not an expensive change. The Government already know exactly who is eligible and who is not, so families should not need to apply. It needs to be automatic from when the child is enrolled in school, or when their circumstances change. That will help schools too because they will get extra pupil premium, and that can then unlock access to resources and support as well as a hot meal for these children.
Free school meals are foundational to a fair and equal school experience. When we provide them, they leave inequality at the school gate and liberate children from the injustice of the haves and the have-nots.
It is imperative that the Government and politicians understand that children are going to school hungry as a result of the political choices made in this place. The evidence is clear. We do need universal provision: a nutritious free school breakfast and lunch provided to all primary and secondary school children as a necessity, as an investment in the future of our children, who are the future of our country. That is what it is—an investment. It should not be seen as a cost.
The right political choices cannot wait a moment longer. Universal free school meals would improve attainment and reduce pressure on teachers, parents and the NHS, and evidence has shown they could help drive local economies. Findings from the Government’s own pilot noted improved academic attainment, with children making between four and eight weeks’ more progress in maths and English. The statistics are astounding. Crucially, universal provision removes all stigma from school food and ensures that all children, regardless of their economic circumstances, have an equal opportunity to thrive and be healthy. Surely that is what we all want in this place.
The Government’s own former adviser, Henry Dimbleby, wrote:
“When children sit down to eat with friends and teachers in a civilised environment, it cements relationships, helps them to develop social skills and reinforces positive behaviour throughout the day.”
Backing that up, the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs heard powerful evidence, including from the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, about the benefits, and that such investment would more than pay for itself in the long run. This has been touched on, but it is important to reinforce that it would pay for itself.
PwC’s cost-benefit analysis of universal free school meals showed the undeniable societal and economic benefits. It calculated that if this Government or future Governments made the investment, the “core benefits” over 20 years of providing universal free school meals would be worth £41.3 billion, compared with a total cost of £24.1 billion. It is an absolute no-brainer, regardless of where anyone sits ideologically.
We need political leadership to guarantee and realise all our children’s right to healthy food. Well done to Sadiq Khan for showing us an example of that leadership in London—it is interesting what popularity it produced. We all knew that—we have been saying it for a long time—and it is great to see the new Mayors who have been elected taking it up. If we accept the universal and compulsory requirement that all children up to the age of 16 must be in school, why do we break the principle of universal care, nurturing and protection in relation to meals during the school day? We would think it absurd for children not to be provided with adequate shelter, heating, drinking water or sanitary provision while in school, so why do we take a different approach to the equally essential element of food?
I pay tribute to all the parents, educators and pupils in West Derby—and MPs—who have been fighting this good fight for a long time. Those good friends, and campaigners and trade unions right across the country, have been campaigning tirelessly for the expansion of free school meals, which is a fundamental part of our Right to Food campaign. Political choices define our time in this place, and I implore the Minister to listen and to make the right political choice by investing in universal free school meals for every child in this country.
I really do congratulate those involved in the project, but we need to ensure that the funding continues and is available for roll-out across our city. That is certainly the ambition of the Labour council, but we need the support of Government. I am delighted that Labour is so committed to ensuring that children start the day with a full stomach. We know the difference that will make for them.
This is not just about what happens for a child in school; it is about resetting the life course inequality that we see across our society. We want to address that by ensuring that children are well fed. That inequality results in differentiations in exam results, in where children move on to, and ultimately in the career choices that they can make and in their incomes. If we are to break intergenerational inequality, that small measure of having high-value, highly nutritious meals at the start of the day—and, I trust, rolling into the middle of the day too—is so important. That can be the game changer that families need.
However, we need to evaluate as we go, and that is why I congratulate the University of York on its investment in not only the project that I described but in looking at child hunger. It is evaluating the difference that the project will make to the lives of those children by looking at how much healthy food is going to them as a result of the menu choices; by looking at the amount of food waste, which is another important factor; and by looking at any changes in readiness to learn, in absence due to ill health or in school attendance. Looking at the data, which I trust the Minister will do, will strengthen the opportunity to roll out these programmes.
It is also important that the programme looks at the stigma around the provision of free school meals. We must remember that no child wants to be differentiated because of the income level or socioeconomic disadvantage their family experiences.