Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the number of children living in food insecure households in England.

The Department’s Healthy Start scheme provides a nutritional safety net to hundreds of thousands of pregnant women and families with children under four in lower-income families. Healthy Start encourages a healthy diet by providing vouchers that can only be spent on fresh or frozen fruit and vegetables, plain cow’s milk and infant formula.

Free school meals, led by the Department for Education, play an important role in ensuring disadvantaged children receive a healthy, nutritious meal each day. They are aimed at families who are out of work or on low incomes.

Under the benefits-related criteria, there are currently around 1.4 million pupils eligible for and claiming a free school meal, saving families around £400 a year for each child.