My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for reminding me that I should declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I have three amendments in this group. I think Amendment 59 is pretty self-explanatory: it would increase the pupil premium in 2023-24 by £160 per primary pupil and £127 per secondary pupil from 2022-23 levels, before pegging it to inflation. That is clear.
Amendment 60 is about alternative education. Members will have heard me going on about that for some time, but it really is important that we look at ensuring that when the most vulnerable pupils—often with special educational needs and often from poorer backgrounds—end up in alternative provision, the financing is transferred swiftly along with their education, health and care plans.
That brings me to Amendment 58, which is the one that I really want to concentrate on. This issue is important. Yesterday I sat in on the child vulnerability debate, which was as a result of the Public Services Committee report. During that debate, I heard our Minister say:
“As your Lordships have reflected, the real test of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable within it”.—[Official Report, 11/7/22; col. 1350.]
She went on to say, quite rightly, that the priority of her department is to support the most vulnerable children. Who could be more vulnerable than the 800,000 children that the Child Poverty Action Group has found live in relative poverty and do not qualify for a free school meal?
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Is it not a basic duty of government to ensure that children can eat healthily? Our children desperately need help and extending free school meals to all universal credit households must be a vital step forward. Children are going hungry now. While families struggle to put food on the table, the Government’s policy is to continue to keep free school meals under review. Government rules restrict free meals to those families with a net annual earning of less than £7,400, excluding the universal credit they receive, yet with food prices having risen by 8.7% in the last 12 months, food shopping is eating into weekly budgets more and more. Can Ministers really expect parents on these squeezed budgets to pay for school meals or provide healthy packed lunches?
The rules also deter parents from working. When universal credit was introduced, the Government promised that parents and families would be better off for every hour that they worked, but that is not true. Many parents make the difficult choice between working more hours or keeping free school meals for their children. A family with three children now has to earn an extra £3,133 after tax to make up for the cost of losing free school meals. This is a Government who claim they want more people to work, but they have created a poverty trap that deters parents from doing so.
The benefits of extending free meals seem to be obvious to everyone except the Treasury—even the Government’s own adviser on the national food strategy, Henry Dimbleby, wants every child whose family claim universal credit to get a free lunch. Remember, this was the person who was appointed by the Government to look at their food strategy. What did the Government do? They rejected his recommendations and snubbed
his back-up proposal to give 1.1 million extra children a free meal. That would have covered more than four in five children in households with low food security.
We will hear, no doubt, that we cannot afford it, it is not our decision to make, it is beyond my pay grade, and that we have not seen what the fiscal policies are. While we are saying all these things, children are starving, or families are having to reduce the amount of food they give their children. At the same time, during the leadership campaign that we are all glued to every night, we hear a succession of candidates say that they will slash taxes. They can find the money to slash taxes but they cannot find the money to feed these poor children. What sort of society have we come to that we are facing this decision?
Free school meals are a simple, unobtrusive way of ensuring that all children from low-income families have at least one balanced, healthy, nutritious meal a day. The Government know this, having already extended free school meals to children without recourse to public funds during the pandemic, which has now been made permanent. I ask the Minister to push aside her brief and reflect on the words she said yesterday about vulnerable children. Let us finally support all those children who need to be fed.