Children’s Future Food Report

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I rise to speak briefly. I am not going to say that there is not a problem; I have too much respect for the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) not to acknowledge that there is. The causes are deep rooted. It will not surprise Members or the Minister if I say that I think one reason is the fact that family life in this country is not as strong as it was generations ago. My grandparents grew up and lived in poverty in Burnley, a very poor mill town, but from my understanding, and having witnessed how they fed themselves on a very modest income as pensioners, I know that hunger was not prevalent in those homes.

The Minister knows that I have said time and again that we need to look into what we can do to strengthen family life. Let me give one example before I address some specific issues relating to the report. In recent years, we have undermined—our Government have done so, too—the role of mothering, the value of a mother and the vocation that many women have to be a mother in the home. Through our financial recommendations, regulations and incentives, we have almost encouraged many women to go out to work, but for some of them there is fulfilment in being at home, where they can care for their children and think about what goes into building and making a home and nurturing. That includes home cooking, which often can be far more nutritious, at a lower cost, than the easier takeaway meals to which those who work, and who work long hours, often resort. I am conscious that if those from the poorest homes go out to work, they often have to work the longest, most antisocial hours. They often have to leave their children to come home alone or to buy something on the way home from school.

I know that the children’s Minister has looked seriously at our “Manifesto to Strengthen Families”, and I urge him to do so again in this context. There is a place for saying that mothering should be valued and esteemed in our society and not, as I fear it has been, rather reduced in respect over the past few years. Many of the children who are now experiencing some of the challenges that we have heard about are doing so because of the reduction in that role. It is not just the immediate family who benefit when mum is able to give such support; the wider family, including cousins and grandchildren—we know the important role that grandparents can play—and the wider community often benefit too. We have all lost out.

I am pleased that Ministers have said that they will look at the report very seriously, and that they will not respond to it in a knee-jerk way. They say that they will carefully consider the findings of the report and respond later in the summer, before the beginning of the next school year. Perhaps the Minister will take into account the wider context of what we are saying about today’s society.

I was particularly interested to see that one of the recommendations relates to supporting pregnant women, which is a really important concern. I am very concerned that we do not pay enough attention to helping women in pregnancy feed themselves and care for themselves. As vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on foetal alcohol syndrome, I know that it is a particular concern that we have noted. Even though there is a Government recommendation that women should not drink during pregnancy, they do, so there is a place for Ministers to speak out much more clearly and strongly about healthy eating during pregnancy.

I have mentioned that I respect the fact that the Government are themselves respecting this report and taking it seriously, and I note that they are already working with Public Health England to look at how nutrition can be better improved. It also appears that it will work with the Food Foundation to explore the creation of a working group to look at how greater oversight of children’s food can be achieved, including engaging with all relevant Government Departments. That is another thing that we do not do enough of in this context: we do not look across Government; we often work in silos. I hope that the Minister will extend his reach right across the very many Departments that need to be engaged if this issue is to be tackled. I am pleased that Ministers have said that they will involve the young food ambassadors, too, because at the end of the day, if we do not hear the children themselves, we are missing something.

Let me look at some of the things that the Government have done. I am pleased that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead referred to the funding of holiday clubs. Although he said that it was not sufficient, it is interesting to note that, last year, the Government awarded £2 million to holiday club providers to deliver free and healthy food, along with enriching activities for children, and that, I think, helped around 18,000 children. I am encouraged that, this year, the Government have extended that to more than £9 million to help 50,000 children. It was certainly a move in the right direction; the funding for holiday clubs has quadrupled.

The Government are working with 11 organisations across England. I am interested to know which they are. It is interesting to note how many organisations are still working voluntarily. Will the Government do any kind of value for money exercise to find out which organisations are providing holiday club food for the best value? Although £9 million is a lot of money, it is still reaching only 50,000 children. Finding a way to support the organisations in local communities that really are providing best value would be an exercise worth including in the work that the Government are undertaking over this summer.

The Minister also said that the Government are investing £26 million in the national school breakfast programme. That is an important scheme, because breakfast helps children to start the day, concentrate and learn. It is sad that so many arrive at school without having had breakfast. We could address that as part of the strengthening families programme by ensuring that parents—not just women, but their husbands or partners—are skilled up in feeding their children well and taught about the importance of breakfast for children during antenatal classes. In fact, much can be done under that umbrella.

I mentioned what it was like generations ago. I was fortunate to inherit a few good habits so that I knew how to feed my children well. I was just lucky. My children seem to have survived—they are 26 and 23—even though I did not formally learn very much about how to feed them well, but there has been a lack of role models in so many areas over recent generations, so there is now a need to use antenatal classes and family hubs to teach people about good nutrition. Some family hubs are already doing that. I welcome their establishment in many parts of the country.

The Minister has greatly supported the family hubs, many of which are teaching good nutrition, which is particularly important because childhood obesity is affecting disadvantaged children more than others. However, something more structured could still be done to help young families and young parents to feed themselves and their children better and more economically. I am therefore pleased that there is more money going into the national school breakfast programme, which I believe will benefit about 250,000 children, but many more children could benefit if we taught people how to feed themselves better. I am interested to hear that the free school meal scheme is being extended, with 1.5 million more infants receiving a free school lunch. The programme is also being extended to further education colleges, and that is very important.

I commend the Government, because they are doing things to address the issue. The soft drinks industry levy appears to have been quite a success, incentivising the industry to reduce the sugar content of soft drinks. The levy has provided money that has enabled us to invest in the PE and sport premium for primary schools, and it is already improving young people’s teeth. A lot has been done, but there is more that can be done. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on alcohol harm, which this week had an interesting meeting about the calorific value of alcohol. I was appalled to see the sugar content of some alcopops. Much can be done to encourage better drinking among youngsters—not necessarily those of school age, but older young people—by labelling all drinks, including alcopops, with their calorific value.

It is good that the Government are committed to improving children’s health through the childhood obesity plan and that a number of Government Departments are involved. I know that the Minister takes this issue seriously, and I know he will take this report seriously as well. There is much more that can be done. The report has made a useful contribution to the debate. I hope that Ministers will continue to take it seriously and to build on the work that has already been undertaken.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I am pleased to have this opportunity to participate in the debate, although I agreed absolutely with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), who is a long-time campaigner on these issues, when he said that this debate should give us cause for shame.

The children’s future food inquiry has done a considerable amount of work, gathering evidence from workshops with nearly 400 children across the UK, alongside polling young people’s views and academic research on food insecurity to produce the report that we are debating today. Much of what it tells us, as well as being shocking, is, sadly, unsurprising. I know that the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) means well, but I am afraid that I had to disagree with her when she said that in previous generations things were not quite so bad. I may not be old enough to have a memory of the generations to which she is referring, but I suspect that things were equally bad if not worse, and people just talked about it less.

[Fiona Bruce]

I am not saying that there was not poverty, but what I am saying is this. My grandmother was born in 1900, and what I witnessed was that she knew how to make a little money go a long way in cooking nutritious meals that fed a family. That seems to be something that we have not passed on from generation to generation, but it is one of the solutions that we could seek to achieve for today’s generation.

[Patricia Gibson]

What I will say in my speech may explain more fully why, although I respect very much what the hon. Lady has said and understand the point that she has made, I do not agree with it. I think that the problem of children growing up in hunger has always been with us, regardless of what generation we are talking about, but in this day and age we are no longer willing to accept it. That is why we have debates like this, and why the report was undertaken in the first place.

We can go back even further. I am a great lover of Charles Dickens. A mere glance at his work tells us that every single novel he ever wrote features a deeply neglected child in challenging circumstances. That is a direct result of his having been sent out to work at a very young age himself, an experience born of necessity to keep hunger at bay. He understood that the sanctity of childhood was lost for ever through poverty, hunger, and an uncaring society. Indeed, his childhood experience —his own truncated childhood—scarred him to such an extent that he never forgot it, which is why he always included in his novels a child who was a victim of a society that did not do enough to protect its children from poverty and want.

In her moving speech, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) shared with us some real-life and very sobering examples from her constituency, which sounded as though they could have been lifted directly from a Dickens novel. That, in this day and age, is utterly and truly appalling. I agree with the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who said that the Government’s role was critical if we were to face down hunger in our children. That view was echoed by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

We know that parents want to do the best for their children, but we also know that it is much easier to do the best for our children if we have a reasonable standard of living and enough money to live on, which in turn will give us enough food to eat. In my constituency, child poverty levels average about 30% across each of the distinct towns. We know that that figure is set to rise, just as the figures will in every other constituency in the United Kingdom, which is absolutely disgraceful. My local authority area has the third highest rate of child poverty in Scotland, which is indeed sobering.

Let us not forget that poverty is not just about money. Today we are talking about the importance of food for children, but poverty does not just rob children of access to proper, nutritious, healthy food; it robs them of self-esteem, it robs them of opportunities, it robs them of hope, and it robs them of the secure sense of wellbeing that every child has the right to enjoy. That casts a shadow over them for the rest of their lives.

I know this, because I myself grew up in poverty, the youngest of eight children. After my father’s death, my mother endured struggles with poverty that no one should have to endure—although, to her credit, I had no idea just how poor we were until I was grown up. That is not a hard-luck story. I share it as a way of showing that I understand, as many in the Chamber do, what poverty can do to a family. I know about the barriers that it creates for parents and, in turn, for their children.

The austerity agenda, which a number of Members have mentioned today, and the fact that families all too often feel punished for their poverty, only adds to the damage, the hopelessness, and the erosion of the idea that life could be so much more. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead spoke of people who have not only been condemned to hunger but all too often been condemned to destitution.

We know it is hard for parents to source healthy and nutritious food on an extremely tight budget that can hardly stretch over a normal week. This kind of hunger does not affect just those children whose parents are on benefits; we must face up to the fact that the working poor exist and many of their children are living in poverty.

To help combat this I am proud to say that the Scottish Government have expanded the provision of free school meals to those eligible for free early learning and childcare and free school meals for infants, and plan to monitor food standards in schools. I am pleased that the children’s future food inquiry report acknowledged that.

In addition, there is to be more funding for more children to have access to healthy food during the school holidays. A six-week holiday for Scotland’s schoolchildren with no free school meals can place an intolerable strain on families who are struggling. We cannot sit by and watch our children go hungry, so the children’s charity Cash for Kids is being granted £150,000 to help local community organisations to support children during the school holidays with activities and access to meals, and this funding is the first allocation of £1 million over the next two years to tackle food insecurity outside of term time.

Every child in Scotland attending a local authority school has a right to a free school lunch in primaries 1, 2 and 3, regardless of their family’s circumstances. After primary 3 these free lunches continue if the child’s parents receive certain benefits. Many Members today have called on the Minister to similarly invest in support for children in England and Northern Ireland and I hope he listens to those pleas.

Alongside the £3.5 million fair food fund to tackle food insecurity, we are working hard in Scotland to ensure that everyone can feed themselves and their families to reduce the reliance on emergency provision. These initiatives matter as we see food bank usage rising. Largs in my constituency food bank usage has soared by between 200% and 300% since November last year. In this day and age that is an absolute disgrace. I cannot understand how any elected representative can be blind to or unmoved by the evidence showing the suffering and hardship caused by recent welfare reforms. It is no accident that the roll-out of universal credit, with its five-week wait for payment, has coincided with an increase in the use of food banks.

All claimants are expected to be on universal credit by 2023, including almost 10,000 more North Ayrshire and Arran households. That means that, sadly, this trend of food bank use looks set to continue, with no sign that the UK Government are prepared to pause and properly fix this system which is not fit for purpose and causes unnecessary hardship.

The food our children eat has implications for life chances, as does the food they do not eat. There is little point in trying to tackle the attainment gap if children go to bed hungry—it cannot be done—and I welcome the Scottish Government’s joined-up approach in that regard.

The SNP Scottish Government announced only yesterday that there will be a new form of support, the Scottish child payment, which will provide £10 each week for all eligible children from low-income families under the age of 16 by 2022, and that payment will increase annually in line with inflation. This benefit will be fast-tracked so all eligible under six-year-olds will receive it by 2021. When delivered in full, 410,000 children will be eligible for this payment. This is yet another front we can open up in the war against hunger in our own children, and it has been warmly welcomed by groups such as Menu for Change, Save the Children Scotland, Oxfam Scotland, the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland and the Poverty Alliance, which describes this new initiative as a “game changer” in the fight against child poverty.

This action from the Scottish Government is expensive, but it is also a political choice to do more to tackle child poverty. I hope the Minister will take note and ask if his Government can afford not to do this. The SNP Scottish Government do not control all the levers of benefits and taxation necessary to truly build the kind of fair society that I believe most people in Scotland want, but with the limited powers they have, they will always do what they can to mitigate poverty while delivering a balanced budget in a minority Administration.

Any debate or report on children’s food and the need to tackle the health implications of the food they eat or the hunger they face is necessarily a discussion about the kind of society we wish to build. What kind of society thinks that children going hungry is ever acceptable? This is an important report, but for all that, it is only a report; it cannot be left to gather dust. It is time for this Government to engage in real reflection on the true cost of hunger to our children and our society, to act accordingly, to fully study the report and to take the necessary action to tackle child poverty and the resultant hunger that is poverty’s bedfellow. It is an absolute disgrace that anybody ever has to go hungry in the United Kingdom. The mark of a civilised society is to combat that in a sensitive and robust way. The Scottish Government are choosing not to pass by on the other side when they see families in need of this basic necessity, and I urge the Minister today to do as much for other families.