Free School Meals

Lord Storey Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Government for this opportunity to understand the Statement on free school meal expansion rather better. I acknowledge that parents and children in receipt of universal credit will welcome the Government’s announcement, and many across the House will welcome a review of school food standards. However, I would be grateful if the Minister clarified a number of points about how this change will work in practice.

As the Minister knows, transitional protections established in 2018 ensured that pupils who were eligible for free school meals would keep them during the universal credit rollout. This nearly doubled free school meal eligibility, from 13.6% to 25.7%. The Department for Education has now announced that these protections will end in September 2026 with the introduction of the new policy. However, it is not clear how many children will be affected by this.

Dr Tammy Campbell, director for early years, inequalities and well-being at the Education Policy Institute, said:

“To the best of our knowledge, the Department for Education has not fully assessed the number of children who will cease to be eligible for FSM as a result of the conclusion of transitional protections”.


She added:

“It is possible that the extension of eligibility will largely serve to balance out the cessation of transitional protections, rather than making significant numbers of children newly eligible”.


Can the Minister confirm whether the department has done such an assessment and, if so, what are the figures that it revealed? If it has not done one, when will that happen?

Can the Minister clarify the position in relation to pupil premium funding, since eligibility for free school meals is currently the gateway to the pupil premium? The pupil premium, which was a significant achievement of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government, provides £1,480 per primary school pupil and over £1,000 per secondary school pupil. My understanding is that the Government initially said that the link between the two will be broken, but then said in a second announcement that the total amount will remain unchanged. Can the Minister confirm exactly the Government’s position, how that will work in practice and whether the Government are indeed committed to the full £3 billion or so of pupil premium funding continuing?

The Government’s announcement included other important figures relating to child poverty, including that this change will lift 100,000 children out of poverty. Again, I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm the timescale for that change. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed that, in the longer term, it believes the policy will lift 100,000 children out of poverty, but it cautioned that, due to the phasing out of the transitional measures which I mentioned earlier, the short-term costs and benefits are likely to be far more limited. Christine Farquharson, associate director of the IFS, said that we will

“not see anything like 100,000 children lifted out of poverty next year”.

How long does the Minister think it will take to reach the Government’s targets? How many children does she believe will be lifted out of poverty next year?

Finally, can the Minister confirm how this policy applies to holiday activities, food funding and home to school transport? Will schools and local authorities continue to receive pupil premium and home to school transport funding based on the existing free school meals threshold or the expanded criteria? I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, we very much welcome the Minister’s Statement. As we heard, over half a million more children will benefit from a free, nutritious meal every day. The Government have estimated that this will put £500 back into parents’ pockets. In the coalition, as we heard, we introduced a free meal for every key stage 1 pupil and prepared to extend this to key stage 2. This is excellent news for parents and their children.

As a primary school head teacher, I was always concerned that the number of pupils’ parents who did not take up the free school meal entitlement was quite alarming. Despite numerous personal letters to those parents, newsletters and all the rest, they still did not take up their entitlement. That is why auto-enrolment of free school meals at a national level ensures that every child gets the meal they are entitled to. Will the Government now follow the example of many successful local authorities and introduce auto-enrolment for meals, and if not, why not?

As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, many vulnerable children spend many weeks each year not in school during the holidays. Will the Government take the opportunity to end holiday hunger and perhaps look at the feasibility of funding for meals during school holidays?

Children on free school meals, particularly those in more affluent areas, often feel embarrassed and stigmatised, and are sometimes bullied, because they are having free meals. Will the Minister assure the House that confidentiality will be maintained at all times for those who are entitled to a free meal?

I realise that the Statement was about free school lunches, but can the Minister update us on the number of children receiving breakfast and the timescale for rolling this out to more schools? The Minister is probably aware of the letter from a whole host of children’s charities about the problems of free breakfast for those children with special educational needs, which I have no doubt will come up during the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

We on these Benches have been pushing hard for the provision of free school meals in schools; it was in our manifesto. It is a victory for thousands of passionate campaigners, and the Government have listened.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, when this Government came into office there were 900,000 more children living in poverty than there had been when the Labour Government left office in 2010. This was a stain on our country. It was a terrible way for those children to live, preventing them having what they needed day-to-day and limiting their opportunities for the future. That is why this Government have announced the biggest expansion of free school meal eligibility in England in a generation, because we can and we must end the scourge of child poverty.

That is why we will give every child whose family is in receipt of universal credit the entitlement to free school meals. That means not simply meals in mouths but, crucially, money back into the pockets of parents and families on an unprecedented scale. It means that 500,000 more children per year will be entitled to free school meals. In response to the noble Baroness’s question, it means that, over the course of this Parliament, 100,000 children will be lifted out of poverty.

I commend the approach of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to asking questions to gain some confidence and elucidation from me—an approach very different from that of the shadow Education Secretary, who did not allow the facts to get in the way of her tweeting completely erroneous information about the Government’s proposals. I will respond to the specific questions raised by the noble Baroness.

First, we have been clear that transitional protections will now be extended to 2026, when all children whose families are in receipt of universal credit will be entitled to free school meals. At that point, we will bring to an end the transitional protections that were put in place to protect entitlement as universal credit rolled out.

Secondly, the Government will continue to spend £3 billion on pupil premium and disadvantage this year. In 2026, the total will remain the same, on the basis of the level of those who would have been entitled to free school meals. Over the longer term, we will take action to consider the most appropriate way to distribute the funding necessary to respond to disadvantage and support schools in a range of ways, so that they can use it to help ensure that all children can succeed, regardless of their disadvantage.

The holiday activity fund will also remain at existing levels. It will enable local authorities to have, as they already do, the flexibility and funding to ensure provision for children who need it.

The entitlement to home school transport will remain the same, based on the current eligibility criteria post 2026, so no children will lose their entitlement to extended home school transport.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about take-up. First, it is likely that the simplicity of now basing the entitlement on universal credit means that it will be much clearer to families, when they claim universal credit, that they are automatically entitled to free school meals. In addition, the Government are also improving the ability for not only local authorities but parents and families to check their eligibility more clearly than they have been able to until this point.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

If we find that that is not having the take-up that we hope for, will the Government look at auto-enrolment?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The Government are extending the entitlement to free school meals because we want children to benefit from them. We will keep under review the extent to which those free school meals and all the benefits that come with them are being taken up.

The noble Lord made a point about the stigma that some children and families feel. I know that many schools are—all schools should be—very careful about the way in which they identify which children are eligible for free school meals and which are not. We have moved some way from the terrible times when those children eligible for free school meals had to sit at separate tables and all the awful things that I know some people have experienced or certainly heard of. Schools will work hard to make sure that there is confidentiality and that that stigma is removed.

On the point about breakfast clubs, we have ensured that, from this April, there are 750 early adopter breakfast clubs across the country, having significantly increased the investment in those breakfast clubs to £30 million. As the noble Lord says, we will be able to consider this and the further rollout of breakfast clubs in more detail when we come to that part of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will put the Government’s intention to ensure that all children in primary schools can benefit from breakfast clubs into legislation.

This considerable investment in our children is a significant sign of this Government’s commitment to tackling the scourge of child poverty. It is, as the Prime Minister says, a “down payment” on the Government’s child poverty strategy and it is symbolic of the difference that a Labour Government make.