Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure that Edenred follows up on individual cases of (a) schools or (b) families being unable to access free school meal vouchers.

We have been working very closely with our national free school meals voucher supplier, Edenred, to improve the performance of the scheme. Edenred has made a number of enhancements to the system to ensure that schools can place orders easily and families can receive this much needed support as swiftly as possible. This includes improvements to significantly reduce waiting times to access the website to order or redeem voucher codes.

Additionally, Edenred has identified a number of voucher code emails which had not been delivered as schools had entered an incorrect email address for the parent or carer. Edenred contacted all schools affected to alert them and to provide guidance on how they could issue new voucher codes to families.

Edenred has reported that over £101.5 million worth of voucher codes have been redeemed into supermarket eGift cards by schools and families through the scheme as of Friday 22 May. Edenred has also reported that 17,000 schools had placed orders for the scheme as of Tuesday 12 May. We are very grateful to families and schools for their understanding and patience while this service has been upgraded to meet demand.

These are rapidly developing circumstances; we continue to keep the situation under review and will keep Parliament updated accordingly.