Bid to give free dinners to kids during holidays
COUNCIL chiefs have revealed ambitious plans to eradicate child hunger in Glasgow.
The City Cabinet has now decided to make food poverty its first priority with a scheme to fight hunger in place by next summer.
It plans to have universal free meal provision in every community in the city.
It comes after the Evening Times revealed more than 2000 families relied on foodbanks during the summer holidays as parents struggled to feed their children.
Now a wide-scale study will be carried out across Glasgow to find out how charities, housing associations, schools and Glasgow City Council can work together to end child hunger.
Glasgow’s Cabinet has asked City Treasurer Allan Gow to begin an assessment of demand, provision and possible issues to report back by the New Year.
Phase one of the scheme is aimed at introducing universal free meals in every community in the city during all main school holidays – not just summer.
These could be delivered in schools or in community centres.
And a second phase will look at expanding free school meals during term time to all pupils, not just those in P1 to P3.
Mr Gow, SNP councillor for Canal, said: “We are new, we have just come in in May with a broad range of commitments and one of those is tackling poverty.
“We have been staggered by the levels of child poverty in the city but this is something where we can make an impact.
“This is Scotland’s greatest city and yet we have young people in Glasgow who are hungry through a lack of food. That must stop, it just has to stop.”
The issue of child hunger is thrown into sharp focus during school holidays, when young people are not able to access school meals, as often there isn’t sufficient cash or food at home.
During the summer holidays, charity Children in Scotland ran its Food, Families, Future (FFF) scheme in a group of Glasgow primary schools to give children a meal and the chance to play together.
The pioneering scheme saw a 25 per cent increase this year on last year.
The Trussell Trust also ran food programmes over the summer break in a bid to cut holiday hungers.
The FFF programme will be evaluated by Glasgow City Council as part of its scoping exercise.
Mr Gow said Glasgow City Council aims to scope out best practice from charities and other groups already working across the city.
He said: “As a council acting alone we cannot solve this. But there are some fantastic projects going on across the city that we can learn from.
“The problem is that there is no joined up thinking so we want to bring everyone together who has knowledge, who are carrying out best practice, and we want to learn from that. This won’t be a one size fits all approach, because that won’t work. The scoping exercise aims to show us what will.
“There will be problems, there will be logistical issues, there will be cost and capacity to look at.
“No-one is saying this will be easy. If it was easy then we would have already solved it.
“I can think of no greater way to empower our communities than by working with them to end this scourge.”
Mr Gow was clear that he hopes the project will have cross-party support and added that councillors from all political groups have experience of helping constituents in need.
He said: “I had a case very early on. A mother came into my surgery to say that she had been made redundant and there was some problem with her redundancy payment so she had no money.
“It had got to the point where she couldn’t feed her children so we referred her to the foodbank for a food parcel.
“She came back to say she couldn’t cook the pasta because she had no