Free School Meals/Pupil Premium: Eligibility Debate
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Stephen Lloyd
Main Page: Stephen Lloyd (Liberal Democrat - Eastbourne)Department Debates - View all Stephen Lloyd's debates with the Department for Education
Free School Meals/Pupil Premium: Eligibility
Stephen Lloyd Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I greatly appreciate the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). The frustration with this issue is that the whole concept behind universal credit is about making work pay. It was defenestrated in 2015 by George Osborne removing the £3 billion and doing it per annum from the work allowance, so it does not make work pay an awful lot. There are lots of clunky bits within universal credit, which I have talked about ad nauseam and which just seem to get worse and worse, which is rather frustrating. Then there are free school meals, which are a tremendous success, yet the Government may well be laying a statutory instrument that will fundamentally not make work pay.
The estimated cost that parents will be paying for a child is £400 if their income is beyond the income floor of £7,400. Imagine I have an income of just over £7,500 and three children. That makes £1,200 before I even get out of bed. Does that make work pay? No, it does not. The rational decision by the parent or parents will be: “What’s the point? There’s no point me doing that extra bit of work and going over £7,500.” That is totally counterproductive.
Unusually for me, I ask the Minister on behalf of the Government to go swinging back to the Treasury and to say to his esteemed colleague, “Government, do nothing.” I know that there are various erroneous, scurrilous rumours going around Parliament and Westminster these days that the Government are not doing an awful lot, but in this case I urge the Minister to do nothing at all. He should not introduce the statutory instrument. The Government should let all children who will be going on to universal credit receive free school meals. I know that would cost £500 million to £600 million, but under the old system things remained the same, because when people went beyond 16 hours the working tax credit made up the difference. I urge the Minister to go back to the Treasury and say, “Do nothing. Let all children on universal credit receive free school meals.”