Free School Meals

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) for bringing this important debate to the House.

I want to declare an interest from the very beginning: I was on free school meals for quite some time as a young lad. With my four brothers, that was five of us all on free school meals for quite some time. We had a very difficult experience. As most speakers have mentioned, there is a stigma attached to free school meals, and we suffered that stigma. However, we lived in a very socially deprived area where the vast majority of people were on free school meals.

It was a terrible situation, but it is not until we grow older and get wiser that we begin to understand what actually happened when we were in that sort of position. We did not argue about what was relative poverty, what was abject poverty and what was absolute poverty. We knew we were hungry, but we did not argue about how hungry we were, and we did not quote politicians and say, “Well, it’s not as bad as it was last year under this Government. It’s not as bad as what it could be, and it’s not absolute poverty.” We were hungry.

If parents who are working have to use a food bank to put food on the table, what does that say for a nation like the UK? The top 1% of people in this country own as much as the bottom 50%. That is the problem: where the wealth of this nation is. Food poverty, child poverty, pensioner poverty—whatever we want to call these issues— are political choices. There is no doubt about that—they are political choices. If we want to feed the kids, we can feed the kids. If it means something else has got to stop, let it stop, and let us feed the kids.

I went to a school in my constituency a while ago—I have mentioned it before. The headteacher was slightly late. He came in and said, “I’m sorry, Mr Lavery. I’ve just had to send a little boy home. I’ve had to exclude him.” This was a child at a first school. I said, “Oh, what’s the problem?” He said, “Well, he went missing. He said, ‘I’m away to the toilet’—he put his hand up, went to the toilet—and didn’t come back.” So they went looking for this little lad. They found him in the cloakroom. He had been in people’s satchels. He had a sandwich in his hand that he had stolen from somebody’s bag. This was a four-year-old kid, who was that hungry he had to steal sandwiches from somebody else. This is 2024, in one of the richest countries in the world—one of the richest countries on this planet—and we have situations like that occurring in schools not just in my constituency but up and down the country.

We have choices to make. Do we want to feed the kids? Are we going to keep debating across this Chamber how many people are in this type of poverty or that type of poverty, and what improvements have been made? If one kid in this country has not got the opportunity for a hot, nutritious meal every day, there is something sadly wrong with this country. It is a simple as that.

We can say what we want, but everyone in here, every MP in this House of Commons and every Member of the Lords—we can all afford as much food as we can eat. That does not mean that we should ignore what is happening out there. Universal free school meals would be very important to kids and very important to the nation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) said, it is an investment in the nation rather than anything else.

I conclude simply by saying that if we, every Member of the House of Commons, cannot agree on that, then you know what? We should bolt the doors of this place, give out 650 redundancy notices and bulldoze this building into the Thames.