Free School Meals

Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Lyn Brown

Wednesday 30th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on securing this very important debate. I, too, shall start with our visit to Sweden, because that was a turning point in our realisation that universal free school meals could be delivered and that a society would consider that the norm for how children are treated at school. My hon. Friend is right that we came back very excited about the possibility of mounting a campaign. It is pleasing to see in the debate today that the organisations and agencies that are firmly focused on alleviating child poverty, such as Barnardo’s, the Child Poverty Action Group and Save the Children, have thrown their weight behind the campaign to secure universal free school meals and to protect what we have achieved so far. It is worth reiterating the substantial progress made in the last Parliament.

We had three pilots, two focusing on universal free school meals for primary school children in Durham and in Newham, including the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). Significantly, we had the promise of a further roll-out to cover at least one local authority in each region, and we had free school meal entitlement elsewhere being extended to primary school children of working parents in receipt of working tax credit with a household income below £16,190. That was to roll out throughout 2010 and 2011.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West said, the extension of free school meals would have lifted 50,000 children out of poverty, but critically it would have increased incentives to work. Without the extension, families moving off benefits into work would be hit by costs of about £210 per year per primary school-age child, so the new Government’s decision sits very uneasily with their policies, about which they tell us frequently, to move people off benefits into work. Barnardo’s and the other agencies make that point strongly. The Government need to consider how to make work pay and ensure that it does, but they also need to go further by examining how we reduce education and health inequalities. Almost all health professionals have criticised the Government’s decision on free school meals, saying that it is an enormous setback to the reduction of education and health inequalities.

My hon. Friend and I may have been spearheading the campaign in the past three or four years, but I must pay tribute to Save the Children, because it first made the argument for free school meals in 1933. It is dreadful that almost a century later, we have not achieved that goal. Save the Children points to the fact that the UN convention on the rights of the child, which every country in the world has now signed, states that Governments are under a duty to

“provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition”.

That convention applies to this Government as well to those elsewhere. Save the Children also points out that 60% of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work, so most of them do not benefit from a free school meals entitlement that is linked to out-of-work benefits. Therefore, we need an answer from the Government about why they have taken this decision when they are trying to move people off benefits.

[Lyn Brown]

Before coming to this place, I did quite a lot of work involving focus groups with women about going into work, being out of work and so on. One of the shocking things that I found was that women had accessed the labour market because they had been told that they would be able to afford to do that and find money on top to enable them to make a better life for their families, but in reality they were in much more debt than they had ever been in before in their lives, because the hidden costs, such as the loss of free school meals, were not taken into account when their benefits were calculated and the figures done. Does my hon. Friend agree that the £690 to £1,000 that a family can save through free school meals can be pivotal to whether a low-income family are able to stay in the labour market?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point and shows how critical it is to have policies such as free school meals in place when trying to move people off benefits and into work.

The coalition promised to prioritise fairness when implementing cuts and to meet the 2020 target of eradicating child poverty, but deeds speak louder than words and it is appalling that one of the first acts of the coalition Government has been to attack the poorest in our society by cancelling the extension of the free schools meals programme. Furthermore, that will not help to close the attainment gap in schools. The previous Government went some way towards improving standards in school across the board and improving attainment levels, but sadly an attainment gap still exists. The position is that 26.6% of the poorest children passed five good GCSEs compared with 54.2% of better-off children in 2008-09, and that is pretty much the case across the board.

If we want to reduce the attainment gap, we must ensure that all children at school are given an equal chance, and results from the pilots in Durham show that free school meals are contributing enormously to reducing attainment gaps. That is because they help children from low-income backgrounds, who may not have good nutrition, to concentrate more in the classroom. In my constituency, every school has free school meals, and I have visited many of those schools in the past few months. There is not one head teacher or one teacher who is not tremendously supportive of the programme. They say that, even at this early stage, it is making a real difference to concentration levels and children’s ability to perform successfully.

The real argument for universality is how it applies across the board. No stigma is attached to free school meals in that case, and many of my local schools have 100% take-up, but the greatest advocates for the programme are the children themselves. When my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana R. Johnson) visited Durham with me to look at the programme, we talked to many of the children, and we found that it was the children in the school who were the advocates and ambassadors for the programme. Of course they had the odd grumble, but generally speaking, at the age of seven, eight and nine, they recognised the value of the programme. They talked about how it was encouraging them to eat healthily and to develop social skills. They liked being able to sit down with their friends and teachers and have their lunch. They said that they were pleased because they no longer had to bring packed lunches, and there was no longer segregation in the school between those having school meals and those having packed lunches.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point; indeed, we were discussing it on the Floor of the House yesterday, when it was noted that the cuts being made to area-based local authority grants are already affecting the extended schools budget, which many local authorities use to support breakfast and after-school clubs.

I honestly wish that the Secretary of State for Education or one of his Ministers had come to my constituency before announcing their policy, because it is impossible to witness the free school meals system in practice, to see how successful it is and then to cut it.

The GMB produced a helpful progress report on free school meals in February, which demonstrated that the free school meals service in Durham was employing 140 additional staff and that food was being sourced locally. Furthermore, it was much more cost-effective to deliver free school meals as a universal, rather than means-tested, service. The system ticked all the boxes because it also helped to educate children and their parents about how to eat properly.

In this time of scarce financial resources, the Government should surely be looking at policies that tick a whole range of boxes and which are cost-effective. Powerful arguments can be made that free school meals are a good investment for the future and that they help to reduce long-term health and education inequalities.

[Lyn Brown]

In Newham, our children were starting to eat different foods from those that they had eaten previously. Mothers were telling me that their children no longer demanded the chicken nuggets that we heard about earlier, but wanted to eat healthier foods that were cooked from scratch with mum and dad in the kitchen at the weekend. Families’ purchasing power was changing because they were eating more cheaply, and the nutritional value of the food that they were eating was changing, too. Regardless of whether we want them to, children dictate what a family eats.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which I hope the Minister will consider.

I want to finish by asking the Minister a number of questions. How will the Government help parents into work without considering the need for free school meals and other such programmes? What will they do to improve health inequalities among children if they do not use free school meals to alter the behaviour of children and families? Why on earth have a Government who said that they were committed to fairness and alleviating child poverty started by attacking families on low incomes? Importantly, how do the Government propose to close the attainment gap and reduce inequality without considering nutrition in schools?