Free School Meals and Child Poverty

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for the intervention and I definitely agree that universality is the way forward for free school meals.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. In York in 2021, 25.3% of children were in poverty, and that number will have gone up substantially in the last 12 months. One thing that really struck me about the event that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) is talking about was the stigma that children experienced because they were different from other children. For that reason alone, surely we should have a universal offer of free school meals for children, so that they have the same stature as their peers and are not marked out as a child needing free school meals.

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for the intervention and will come on to the point about stigma later.

More than 200,000 children are eligible for free school meals but are currently missing out. At my free school meals event with the National Education Union on Tuesday in Parliament, which received cross-party support, we heard some heartbreaking testimonies from youth ambassadors for the End Child Poverty coalition.

Liv, Emilia and Naomi, who have lived experiences of food poverty, spoke passionately about their personal experiences of being singled out in front of their friends and watching their parents skip meals to ensure that they were fed. They spoke about the long-term impact on their mental health, on their relationship with food, and on their responses to the current pressures of the cost of living crisis, and about the trauma response that growing up with such pressures has instilled in them. One said that having free school meals was like having a badge pinned to their blazer that read “Poor.” That stigma often worsens in secondary school and can be incredibly alienating for children struggling to fit in and thrive.

Data from the Child Poverty Action Group has shown that 800,000 children currently living in poverty are not eligible for free school meals, and miss out on holiday support and other benefits. That number is increasing every day, with many families falling into debt with school lunches. Crucially, children are denied a meal if they are more than two weeks in arrears.

On the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday, the new Prime Minister said that

“we have what it takes to tackle those challenges”

and that we can “ride out the storm”, but the energy price guarantee announced this afternoon will not support families already in crisis. They will be paying far more, not less.

A recent report from the Food Foundation revealed that about 2.6 million children live in households that missed meals or struggled to access healthy food. Levels of insecurity in households with children have risen by more than 40% since the start of this year alone. We are one of the richest countries in the world, yet so many low-paid workers, including public sector workers, rely on food banks. Nearly 70% of food bank providers say, however, that they may need to turn people away or shrink the size of emergency rations due to a completely unsustainable surge in demand that will prevent them from feeding the hungriest families this winter.

The Government-commissioned national food strategy, authored by Henry Dimbleby, calls for the extension of free school meals for all under-16-year-olds in households earning under £20,000, to help to tackle the nutritional gap between rich and poor in this country. Children in the most disadvantaged areas are now being diagnosed with Victorian diseases such as rickets, scurvy and scarlet fever—and that was even before the cost of living crisis.

Four councils have rolled out universal free school meals for all primary school children. Southwark pioneered that flagship initiative a decade ago in response to the so-called once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis. The results speak for themselves. Pupils made four to eight weeks’ more progress than expected. The schools have seen a massive improvement in attainment over the last 10 years and have gone from being fourth bottom to more than 90% being rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. Nearly a quarter more children were eating vegetables at lunch time, and there was an 18% reduction in children consuming crisps and soft drinks. Hammersmith and Fulham has seen a 60% increase in secondary school children on free school meals since 2018, and it is now piloting universal free school meals for secondary pupils.

Universal provision contributes to family food security. It improves pupils’ concentration and behaviour. It improves attendance, which is also a key aim of this Government’s Schools Bill. It increases the amount of fruit and vegetables and reduces the amount of sugar and salt consumed by pupils at lunch time. Crucially, it also reduces the stigma that many children who receive free school meals feel when they are singled out from their peers.

Often, stigma and mental health are overlooked in Government policy discussions—poorer children are expected to put up and shut up, and be grateful for their handouts—but the reality is incredibly damaging. It can cause long-term trauma and problems, and makes the means-tested policy far less effective. Yes, universal free school meals will cost. Yes, they should be understood as an investment in our future. However, these are children, and everything we do should allow them to flourish and thrive. Their bright futures should be our priority. We cannot lose sight of the human impact of not feeding our children, or of choosing an arbitrary threshold to decide who deserves to go hungry and who deserves to be fed.

Universality provides far greater opportunities to improve educational attainment across the board and to reverse the ever-growing inequalities. Investing in our children now will be better for everyone in the long term. Prevention is better than cure. Doing nothing now will reduce the productivity of the future workforce. It will put greater pressures on the NHS. It risks a generation suffering from poor mental health and poor physical health, and being trapped in a never-ending cycle of poverty.

[Rachael Maskell]

My hon. Friend is being generous with her time. I very much want York to adopt free school meals for all primary school children, and then to look at rolling that out to secondary school children. However, I also want to ensure that children in my constituency have access to a hot nutritious meal in their stomachs every day through the school holidays. I take it that my hon. Friend will also be campaigning against the school holiday hunger that we still see in our constituencies.

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my good friend for her contribution, and I definitely will be promoting food security during holiday periods. It is not just about children having a hot nutritious meal; in reality, it means so much more. It sets the foundations for improved behaviour and improved attainment. It means better health, better jobs, higher salaries and higher life expectancy—in short, the chance to break the vicious cycle of poverty.

UK food prices have hit the highest levels since 2008. Children are going hungry right now. They simply cannot afford to wait for this Government while they are dragging their feet. The last time the Tories tried to resist helping hungry children, there was public outrage—

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelly Tolhurst]

I absolutely get the point about stigma, and I know that schools work incredibly hard to overcome it. Free school meal eligibility will be under review, and in this post I look forward to getting into the detail and speaking to stakeholders, schools, parents and children, as I do already in my constituency. I look forward to widening the scope of that.

[Rachael Maskell]

I, too welcome the Minister to her new position. Richard Titmuss famously said that services to the poor are poor services. As we look at that divide, we know that many parents do not claim free school meals because of stigma, so children go hungry and without. Of course, parents often make sacrifices, too. Will she look at the equation again and at how we can bring greater equality into the lives of our young people?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

I thank the hon. Lady for that point. As I said, I, like all Members of Parliament, absolutely care about our young people in school and want them to thrive, have great lives and enjoy their school years, and we must ensure that stigma does not exist for them. In my role, I will look at many things, and I am more than happy to look at that further. We do not have plans to extend the universal provision in England, but, as I said, we will continue to keep free school meal eligibility under review to ensure that those meals are supporting those who need it most.

Let us look at some of the detail. We currently have an earnings threshold of £7,400 for families on universal credit, but that does not include income from benefits—those payments are not included—so household incomes can be considerably higher than that threshold without children being excluded from a free school meal. Extending free school meals to all families on universal credit, for example, would carry a significant financial cost, quickly running into billions of pounds, and yet some of those households have incomes exceeding £40,000 a year. Those are clearly not among the most disadvantaged, and other households would have a greater need of our support.

As every family knows, it costs more to put a healthy meal on the table than it did even just a year ago, and it is no different for free school meal provision. We have therefore increased core funding for schools. This year, the free school meals factor in the national funding formula has increased to £470 per pupil to take into account inflation and other cost pressures that schools face. We are also providing extra core funding through the schools supplementary grant, which represents a significant increase of £2.5 billion for the 2022-23 compared with last year. We are also spending £600 million on universal infant free school meals each year as well as about £40 million on delivering free meals to around 90,000 disadvantaged students in further education. In addition to that, we will provide more than £200 million a year for the next three years to deliver healthy food during holiday periods through our holiday activities and food programme. We are also funding breakfast clubs in more than 2,000 schools, and the school fruit and vegetable scheme and Healthy Start vouchers add further support.

The Government are committed to a sustainable, long-term approach to tackling poverty—especially child poverty—and supporting people on lower incomes. There are currently about 1.27 million job vacancies across the UK, and we believe that the best and most sustainable way of tackling child poverty is to ensure that parents get the right sort of help and support to move into work. We know that employment—I am talking primarily about a full-time job—offers the best chance of reducing the risks of poverty. Our multimillion-pound plan for jobs has protected, supported and created jobs, and will continue to help people across the UK to find work and develop skills to progress their careers and increase their earnings.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelly Tolhurst]

Ahead of today, we had already announced a significant package of support for those most in need—I outlined the extra £400. Local authorities also have the household support grant scheme, which is accessible by people who are in need and is an opportunity for those who have fallen through certain gaps to access funding they may require.

We need to invest in home-grown energy and drive reform in the energy market to secure the UK’s supply. Putin’s weaponisation of the energy supply has exposed the UK’s vulnerabilities to the volatility of global markets, coupled with a regulatory framework no longer fit for purpose which is driving up bills and holding back economic growth. A new six-month scheme for businesses and other non-domestic energy users, including public sector organisations like schools, will offer equivalent support to that being provided for consumers. That will protect them from soaring energy costs and provide them with the certainty they need to plan their business. After the initial six-month period, the Government will provide ongoing, focused support for vulnerable industries. There will be a review in three months’ time to consider where that should be targeted to make sure that the most in need get support.

[Rachael Maskell]

Let me bring the Minister back to the debate about free school meals, because that is really important and I want to make sure that we make the most of this time and opportunity. One of the issues that I raised was holiday hunger and the fact that many children go without food during the school holidays, and that still continues. What steps will she take to ensure that all children who experience food poverty get access to a hot meal every day?