Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, Amendment 193 in this group is also in my name. I say again how pleased I am that the Labour Government have broadened the eligibility for free school meals. However, much still needs to be done, particularly on the quality of the meals and the enforcement of the standards, which needed reviewing anyway—that was the subject of Amendment 190, debated last week—and to ensure that all eligible children get their meal. In recent years the whole issue of school meals has been left to flounder, despite their importance to children’s health, and I am pleased that the Government are now picking it up again. Amendment 189 calls for an annual review, with the results to be laid before Parliament, of the barriers to all eligible children receiving their free school meal, and clarification of how many eligible children are missing out. The review must assess how many children are eligible, under whatever the current threshold is, and how many would be eligible if the threshold had been uprated since 2018. It must also assess how many would be eligible if the threshold were to be set at £20,000 per year after tax. Because of the inequalities that we know about, the review would have to cover regional and demographic disparities in take-up rates and the financial and educational impact on schools and local authorities, bearing in mind that a child on free school meals currently brings the pupil premium with him or her to the school for education purposes. That set of reviews would give us more information about how the system was working and would form a very useful underpinning for the development of policy in future. Amendment 193 would ensure the auto-enrolment of all children eligible for free school meals and expand eligibility even further than the recent change to households whose income is less than £20,000 per year after tax. That would be yet another step in the right direction. I know that the Secretary of State, in making the recent announcement that all children in families on universal credit will be eligible for free school meals next year, claimed that this simpler system will make it easier for families to register. However, it is still not the same as auto-enrolment, and schools as well as families are losing out because they are losing the pupil premium that comes with FSM. The evidence to the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee was clear that there are many children who would become eligible, under whatever threshold, who may not get their free school meal, such as it is, and that there are many children in poverty whose parents struggle to pay for a hot meal for their children. These parents or families, eligible but not registered for FSM, often send the child to school with a packed lunch of dubious nutritional value—we were given several examples—not because they do not care about their children’s health but because they cannot afford the price of a decent packed lunch or a hot meal. It is these unregistered families, and those just above the eligibility threshold, who suffer the most from regulations. Free school meals, and breakfasts, are one of the most important levers that the Government have to ensure that, however poor the parents, however lacking their cooking facilities at home, whatever kind of food desert the family live in, the children can get two healthy meals every school day—if they also get a free breakfast—to ensure that they grow up strong and a healthy weight, with no rotting teeth and no wrong food preferences to take through life and make them susceptible to obesity. I hope the Government will agree with these amendments, and I beg to move.