School fast food vans return with popular diet of burgers, chips (and human rights)

WHEN the bell rings for lunchtime at St Aidan’s High School, hundreds of hungry pupils spill out from classrooms, looking for lunch. They don’t have far to go.

Less than five paces from the school gates, students can buy chips, burgers and fizzy drinks – and, as a court ruled this week, doing so is their human right.

Yesterday, business was booming at Patricia Hardie’s burger van outside the school in Wishaw, Lanarkshire. This week, a court decided North Lanarkshire Council’s ban on fast-food traders within 270 yards of schools was a breach of human rights.

Mrs Hardie, 52, said she was ‘absolutely delighted’ by the verdict, although it has sparked a debate about childhood obesity. During a hearing earlier this year, lawyers representing a group of van owners argued that ordering them to move away from schools breached the human rights of them and their customers.

On Wednesday, Sheriff Vincent Smith agreed with them, overturning the ban.

By lunchtime yesterday, scores of children lined up as usual to get their favourite greasy snacks, blissfully unaware of the legal wrangling and the row about childhood obesity.

Just under a third of Scottish children are at risk of being overweight, and 17 per cent are at risk of obesity. Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said the ruling was a step backwards in the fight against the bulge.

He added: ‘Scotland has an even bigger problem than England in terms of childhood obesity. The ruling on the North Lanarkshire vans makes a nonsense of all the efforts by schools to get children to eat healthily and do exercise. They go outside the school gates and stuff themselves with chips and pies.

‘Local authorities find it time-consuming to rebuff the many challenges by outlets, who want to stay put. I hope the Government does something about it. If we are trying to cure obesity, this is not helping at all.’

Stephen McGowan, head of licensing at law firm TLT, which represented 30 North Lanarkshire van owners, said: ‘These are all small, family businesses, which in some cases have traded for more than 30 years from the same spot without issue, and have passed their food hygiene assessments every year.’

North Lanarkshire Council is understood to be reviewing the judgment and may consider an appeal.