Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the potential effects on school milk provision in the UK of the announcement by the EU Commission in December 2014 that the EU School Milk Scheme will be evaluated as part of CAP simplification.

In principle, I support the reform of the EU scheme which the Commission first proposed in January 2014. However, work on this dossier has become bogged down on a number of important issues, including Member State concerns about the correct legal basis for the proposals, the nature of their objectives and scope, and the main financial provisions. I therefore support the Commission’s decision to review it. Defra will engage constructively with this process. In the meantime, the existing arrangements for school schemes – agreed during CAP reform and set out in Regulation (EU) No 1308/2103 – will continue to apply. Under the EU scheme, UK school children benefit from subsidies worth approximately £3.5 million a year.

In addition to the EU subsidy scheme, all pre-school children in England, Scotland and Wales who are under 5 and in day care are eligible for free milk under our domestic nursery milk scheme. The total cost of the scheme was £61 million in 2012-13.