PKC move over school meals is wrong approach
With days to go before Perth and Kinross Council went into a summer recess of sorts, the Tory administration brought forward a paper to reconsider plans to deliver frozen meals in primary school canteens across Perth and Kinross.
These plans were originally brought forward back in 2019 and faced significant public backlash.
At the time, a petition organised by the now MP for Angus, Dave Doogan, received over 3000 signatures from parents and carers who were against the frozen meal plans.
With very little notice, the plans were back on the table again – dressed up as somehow being required now due to an expansion in free school meal provision from the Scottish Government.
That argument doesn’t stack up and it certainly doesn’t align with the arguments that were being used by the administration back in 2019.
At that stage we were told we needed to ship our school meal provision to Dundee because of a lack of uptake of meals, and now we are told it is necessary because the current system is overstretched.
Those two facts cannot be simultaneously true!
Regardless of the lack of detail provided to councillors, at the heart of this is that parents do not want it.
My inbox was full of people saying they thought it was the wrong message to be sending to our kids and social media was ablaze with people sharing their viewpoint. We have some of the best produce in the world grown on our doorstep and I am concerned that by
Regardless of the lack of detail provided to councillors, at the heart of this is that the parents do not want it
breaking that link, we will have lost an opportunity to deliver the best school meal provision in Scotland.
Nevertheless,Tory councillors ploughed ahead with the proposals and the five votes needed to get it over the line were all-sofamiliarly given by the Liberal Democrat group. It would seem that, despite no longer being in the administration, they cannot help themselves from voting with their former colleagues.
The SNP group tried to argue against the decision and received support from Labour and independent councillors but, sadly, the numbers did not stack up.
Councillors voted to have our school meal production moved to the central freeze cook facility in Dundee and strip out that local element that has existed for so long.
In my view it is a shortsighted decision and we should be doing more to provide school meals that are prepared and cooked on-site.
Given the expected rise in demand, it is quite possible that we would have needed to be more ambitious than the current provision, but I do not think the model that the council has opted for delivers what our young people deserve.