‘Appalling’ free school meals postcode lottery
FAMILIES face a postcode lottery over feeding their kids during the summer holidays.
As the cost-of-living crisis hits the country’s most vulnerable, we can reveal huge differences in what parents get to help plug the gap of free school meals during the six-week break.
Footballer Marcus Rashford campaigned to feed kids out-ofterm time during the pandemic.
And now local councils are allowed to give families money to help.
But the payments vary massively depending on where they live.
In parts of London, parents are entitled to £90 per child to feed them during the summer holidays, while in Peterborough it’s £50.
Families in Havering, London, will get £90 for each child, but in Nottinghamshire the figure dips to £50 paid as food vouchers, while parents in Kent get £50 – down from £90 last year.
In Northern Ireland families have been promised £13.50 a week in two instalments, while in Glasgow families will get
£222.50 for each child over the holidays, but in Dundee the figure drops to £72.
Campaigners are calling for payments to be the same across the board for the 1.9 million kids who get free school meals.
Helen Barnard, associate director of the Joseph Rowntree Trust, said: “Families in every part of the country will be full of anxiety, wondering how to keep the kids fed and occupied. But they’re subject to a postcode lottery and may not even be aware of the help they could get.
“Every family should have the support they need to cover essentials and give their kids a decent summer.”
Ian Byrne, the Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby, last night said the Government needed a national approach to the crisis.
He added: “It’s absolutely appalling to see there’s a postcode lottery, because a hungry child is a hungry child.
“It doesn’t matter if a kid is living in Dundee, Liverpool or London – they all need feeding 365 days of the year.
“It’s even more crucial today because we’re going into the worst cost-ofliving crisis in living memory.
“Pretty soon we’ll be seeing the same sort of scenes that people saw in the 1920s.
“This needs a response as though we were going to war. It needs a national approach so that every child gets fed, regardless of postcode.
“Surely that’s what levelling up is? But at the moment that’s blatantly not true.”
The Salvation Army is also calling for families to be given breathing space from Universal Credit debt.
Lieutenant Colonel Dean
Pallan said: “When I hear our officers report that people are on the bones of their knees and they’ve seen children who are ‘anorexically thin’ it sounds like something from 1865 when
The Salvation Army was founded, not 2022.”