Free School Meals

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

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.

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.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, and always an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery). I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing this very important debate.

After 14 years of Conservative Government, a record number of children in Coventry South and across the country are growing up in poverty, arriving at school hungry in the morning and going to bed hungry at night. In the west midlands, 11 children in every class of 30 are living in poverty. Due to the strict eligibility criteria for free school meals, by which families have to earn less than £7,400 a year to qualify, across the country nearly 1 million children in poverty are missing out.

We have all heard horror stories like the one we just heard—pupils turning up to school with just mouldy bread or a packet of crisps for lunch, or sometimes with nothing at all; kids bursting into tears because they are worried that there is no food at home, or stealing bagels from breakfast club or from their friends’ satchels just to get by. That is why, along with trade unions and other anti-poverty groups, I have long campaigned for universal free school meals for primary school children, so that every child in primary school throughout the country is given a warm, healthy lunch each day, and no-one is left learning on an empty stomach.

The benefits of this policy are clear. Research shows that free school meals boost children’s concentration, behaviour and attainment. They also have health benefits, improving nutrition and reducing obesity. It is also a great help to families, saving parents’ time and relieving financial pressure. As has been highlighted in this debate, it is important that free school meals are universal, giving all children the opportunity to eat, learn and grow together. Means-tested policies create stigma and they allow children to slip through the net. Too often, means-tested services are lower quality services, and services for the poor do indeed become poor services.

We see consensus growing on this issue, which is very welcome. In Wales and Scotland, all primary school children are set to receive a free, warm, healthy lunch each day. It is about time England did the same.

In last week’s elections, mayoral candidates up and down the country campaigned and were elected on a platform of supporting free school meals for all primary school kids. In London, Sadiq Khan has already made this a reality and now pledges to make it permanent with funding from his mayoral budget. Mayors including Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, newly elected Richard Parker in the West Midlands and Kim McGuinness in the North East are calling on the Government to give them the funding they need to deliver it too. They know that this policy makes common sense and they know it is popular too, with 75% of parents supporting universal free school meals for primary school kids. That is why they have won their elections. Is it not time that this Government took a leaf out of the book of Khan, Burnham, Parker and McGuinness, and instead of ignoring children in poverty and resorting to desperate attacks on minorities to distract from their own failings, they start to deliver the popular, unifying, anti-poverty policies our communities need, starting off with universal free school meals for primary school children?

[Mr Betts]

I thank all colleagues for being so co-operative in terms of the time. I will call the Front Benchers now, starting with the Scottish National party spokesperson.