Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the number children of universal credit recipients in Wolverhampton North East who (a) will and (b) will not qualify for free school meals.

The Department for Education does not hold information on the specific qualifying benefit that determines free school meal eligibility for individual pupils. We do not hold future estimates broken down by benefit type or constituency.

The department publishes information on free school meal eligibility in the statistical first release: ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’. This is published at national and local authority level, and the latest data is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2017.

Under our proposed criteria for free school meals under Universal Credit, we estimate that by 2022 around 50,000 more children in England will benefit from a free school meal compared to the previous benefits system.