By SC Cook
THE QUESTION OF FREE SCHOOL MEALS AND CHILD HUNGER HAS RISEN UP THE POLITICAL AGENDA AS THE PANDEMIC EXPOSES THE TRUE EXTENT OF WALES’ POVERTY CRISIS. NOW THE WELSH LABOUR GOVERNMENT FIND THEMSELVES ON THE DEFENSIVE OVER THE ISSUE AHEAD OF CRUCIAL SENEDD ELECTIONS AND IN THE FACE OF A DETERMINED CAMPAIGN.
Welsh Labour MSs are facing a growing backlash over their refusal to allow tens of thousands of children in poverty to claim a free school meal. Last week, for the third time in as many months, every Labour MS followed party orders and voted down a motion that would have committed Welsh Government to significantly increasing the number of children guaranteed a free lunchtime meal. It was the latest flashpoint over an issue that is putting Mark Drakeford’s government in an increasingly untenable position.
“It is a disgrace to see a party in Wales – once represented by Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan who waged war on poverty and hunger – voting to continue denying over half of children in poverty a hot lunch.,” says Adam Johannes, who has been helping to coordinate the campaign for People’s Assembly Wales, one of the groups fighting for a change in the system.
The question of who receives a free school meals has risen up the political agenda as the Coronavirus pandemic shines an ugly light on the appalling levels of poverty in Wales and all over Britain.
Last year, the Premier League footballer Marcus Rashford defeated the Tory government with his effective and high profile opposition against plans to stop providing free meals during school holidays.
Rashford’s powerful description of his own experience of poverty put the issue of child hunger front and centre of British politics, highlighting the appalling state many families had been left in after a decade of austerity.
Poverty Exposed
The Labour Government in Wales claimed the moral high ground, pointing out that from the outset of the pandemic, they had ensured that free school meal provision would continue outside of term time.
But that wasn’t the whole story, and the attention the situation had received in England soon transferred over to Wales. In October, the Child Poverty Action Group blew the lid on the situation and revealed that around 70,000 children – over half of those considered to be in poverty in Wales – were deemed ineligible for the provision.
They said that this was “mainly because their parents are in low-paid jobs which take them over the eligibility threshold.” If a child’s family receives Universal Credit but earns over £7,400 a year through paid work, they do not qualify for free school meals.
But the charity also added that nearly 6,000 children don’t normally qualify for free school meals because their families have no recourse to public funds. The revelations exposed not only the extent of poverty in Wales, but the way in which so many children in poverty could be being denied their basic right to food.
This quickly turned into a campaign which caught the Welsh Labour government on the back foot.
In December, an online meeting hosted by People’s Assembly Wales was addressed by speakers from The Child Poverty Action Group, The Bevan Foundation, The National Education Union, Unite, and The [Betty] Campbell Network, which campaigns over access to education in Wales.
Thousands of people tuned in to hear speakers discuss why free school meals were not just important for children in poverty, but something that should be universal for all pupils. Model motions were drawn up for unions and party branches, and a Senedd petition was launched to demand that Welsh Government change its position.
The campaign has gathered pace against a backdrop of soaring food bank use and pandemic related poverty. One foodbank coordinator in Splott, Cardiff, recently told voice.wales that in a two-hour slot on Tuesdays, they will serve a minimum of 150 people and provide around 250 to 300 food parcels each week.
Things have only worsened in the pandemic the coordinator said, especially for “low-income families” with young children. The foodbank is just one of 18 separate centres that operate within Cardiff, and Wales as a whole has the highest poverty rate in Britain.
In this crisis situation, Plaid Cymru have picked up the issue of free school meals, recognising a real social problem but also sensing a political opportunity. One of their MSs, Sian Gwenllian, put down the first amendment in December which echoed the campaign’s central demands.
Labour refused to support the motion, arguing that it was too costly and that they already provided adequate support. As a matter of course, the party rarely backs Plaid motions, even when it’s politically damaging. There might usually be a small outcry for a day, but it often passes fairly quickly. That hasn’t been the case with free school meals, and in an ironic twist the outcry over the issue in England, partly cheered on by Welsh Labour politicians, has only helped intensify the spotlight on their own government.
Plaid has run with the issue, putting down a further two amendments and upping the political pressure.
Then in January, Rhondda Cynon Taf council, one of the biggest local authorities in Wales by population, and with high levels of child poverty, called on Welsh Government to change its position and increase the number of poor children who are eligible for free school meals.
The motion was put forward by the Plaid group but crucially backed by Labour councillors as well as independents. Plaid Cymru councillor for Pontypridd, Heledd Fychan, led the effort to get the motion passed.
She said she was proud of the motion but disappointed that Welsh Government still refused to back it. She describes regularly coming across people in her work who would clearly benefit from free school meals, and says this is backed up by the rise in use of her local foodbank over the past year.
“In Pontypridd, roughly 27% of children currently live in poverty. In the areas most impacted by the 2020 floods, this number jumps to 35%. That is a blight on our communities and something must change,” Ms Fychan says.
Nevertheless, she was pleased that the whole council backed the demand, describing it as an “important step” in securing equity for children in Wales with those in England and Scotland, where there is already universal free school meal provision for children aged between four and seven.
Inequalities
Exposing the inequalities between kids in Wales and those across the border has been one of the main aspects of the campaign.
Not only have people begun to realise that so many children whose parents receive the pitiful Universal Credit allowance are not guaranteed a lunchtime meal, they quickly discovered that Wales was worse than Tory-run England in other areas too.
Wales has the worst eligibility criteria out of the four UK nations, and unlike Scotland and England, the youngest children don’t automatically qualify for free school meals. In other words, an infant aged child in Cheltenham is guaranteed a hot meal at lunch in school, regardless of income, but in Wales they’re not.
In highlighting these uncomfortable truths, the campaign has lifted the lid on a culture of secrecy around cuts and austerity which has been a feature of Welsh politics for over a decade. Despite some £3.5bn being cut from the Welsh budget since 2009, and many councils losing millions in funding, the issue has rarely come to the fore.
But the momentum behind free school meals has forced Welsh Government to admit that the reason so many poor children are losing out is because of funding.
Rebecca Evans said last week that extending free school meal provision to all children in poverty would cost £350m per year because of consequential costs.
“It simply doesn’t wash that this money is found from the additional funding this year’s budget contains,” she said, responding to the idea that Welsh Government could use existing money.
But activists I spoke to questioned the veracity of this figure, saying it was the first time it had been mentioned and that Welsh Government may be pricing the costs of individual meals too high. The Bevan Foundation have announced that they are partnering with Policy in Practice to find out exactly how much it would cost to expand the scheme and to make it available for all children.
Instead of committing to changing the system now, Labour have promised a review in the future, but given the fact that the party has been in power for 23 years in Wales, this too has been questioned.
“If the promise of a review were in the spirit of genuinely wanting to feed more poor children, but just wanting to research the most effective means of doing it, it would have some purpose,” says Adam Johannes. “But given the clear hostility in their statements since the vote, this seems unpromising.”
He cites the fact that a cross party equality committee chaired by John Griffiths in 2019 recommended exploring ways to double the income threshold for people to claim free school meals to match Northern Ireland, yet nothing happened.
Adding to the scepticism is the fact that a child poverty review – which argued for expanding the provision – was left unpublished for months, leading to claims of a deliberate attempt to suppress it. Welsh Government said it sat on the report due to Covid.
But the ongoing debacle has now led to an increasing number of calls from within Welsh Labour itself for the party leadership in Wales to change its position.
On the day of the Senedd vote last week, Cynon Valley Labour MP Beth Winter came out in support of the campaign.
Writing on her website under a piece titled: “Who could disagree with the statement that no child in Wales should go hungry,?” she said that whilst she praised Welsh Government for providing free breakfasts for infants and support during lockdown, they had a duty “to ensure that no child in Wales goes hungry.”
“I recognise that there are cost implications to doing this,” she wrote. “But there are significant costs involved in not doing it: costs to the health of our children, to families who live in poverty and to the well-being of future generations.”
The MP also called for free meals for all children to be a goal of Welsh Government, but said that expending provision to more children in poverty “needs to be achieved as a matter of urgency.”
On top of Ms Winter’s statement, a meeting of Ceredigion Labour Party voted unanimously to campaign for universal free school meals in a motion which was moved by their Senedd election candidate.
But Welsh Labour are also being shown up by Labour run councils in England, who have found the money to increase free school meals despite being in incredibly precarious financial situations themselves. Tower Hamlets and Newham, two of the poorest boroughs in London offer universal free school meals to all primary school children.
Austerity
Welsh Labour can rightly point to Tory austerity and in particular Universal Credit as being the biggest drivers of that, but as a devolved administration who’ve been in power for so long, they can’t be surprised if people point the finger squarely at them too.
“After twenty years of a Labour-led government, there are still 200,000 children living in poverty in Wales,” says Heledd Fychan of Plaid. It’s a political attack but one that Labour know will resonate beyond the bubble of Cardiff Bay.
In response, there will no doubt be some counter pressure from party leaders to quieten down as the Senedd elections get nearer. But that could also provide an opportunity for activists hoping to use the pressure of the election as leverage.
The mounting revolt is clearly having an impact already, with backbench MSs reportedly getting increasingly frustrated with the leadership. There’s also some signs that this is being felt in government.
Ellie Harwood of the Child Poverty Action Group, who have been instrumental in bringing the whole issue to light, said that although they were disappointed with the result of the vote last week, they welcomed the commitment to “ongoing free school meal provision for children in families with no recourse to public funds, saying that it would “help to protect these children from even greater destitution and hardship.”
But she said more must now be done over the issue of which children are guaranteed a meal at lunchtime: “Wednesday’s vote has shown that there is considerable cross-party support for providing more help to families on low incomes.
It is time for the Welsh Government to listen to the concerns of communities across Wales and expand the free school meal eligibility criteria to include all children growing up in poverty.”
The next crunch date will come as soon as March 9th, the vote on the Welsh Budget. Activists are urging people to make the campaign a priority. They are clear that this is only the ‘first step’ in fighting for universal free school meals, meaning all children regardless of income will receive a healthy meal every day
On Monday 8th March at 6 pm – the night before the Welsh budget – the campaign will stage an online rally to mark International Women’s Day.
The rally, titled ‘Food Poverty is a Feminist Issue’ will be addressed by Welsh and international speakers, including Rebecca Boden from Tampere University in Finland, where they have had universal free school meals since 1948. Selma James, founder of the Wages for Housework campaign in the early 1970s, will also speak.
“Making sure that no child goes hungry must be made the biggest issue in Welsh politics,” says Adam Johannes.
“We ask everyone whose a member of a political party, trade union, student union, or community group to commit their organisation to supporting our campaign for all poor children to get free school meals as a first step towards all children getting free school meals, and please lobby your Senedd Members ahead of the Welsh budget on 9th March.”
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