Will the Tories scrap the Lib Dems’ silliest vanity project, free school meals for infants? The Daily Mail reports today that they might, amid spiralling costs and with the spending review approaching. Nick Clegg announced this daft scheme at his party’s conference in 2013.
It sounded ever so wholesome when the Deputy Prime Minister promised a ‘healthy lunch’ for every child in reception and years 1 and 2. But the scheme – which also cost a lot more than intended to implement – was daft because it didn’t improve life for poor children. Sure, it was a nice ‘retail offer’ to parents who can afford to pay for lunch for their children, but those children whose families were struggling didn’t get a free meal: they were already eligible for one. Schools report children arriving at school hungry and malnourished because their parents are struggling to give them breakfast, but Clegg’s scheme made no difference to that either: it just gave people what they could already afford.
So given it was a daft scheme and given these school meals are outside the protected element of the Department for Education’s budget, scrapping them in the spending review might not be the worst thing to do, given it won’t make things more difficult for needy people.
But there’s one small problem. It relates to a very short sentence, which may possibly seem a little daft too:
‘We will support families by providing free meals to all infants.’
If you don’t recognise that sentence, it’s because it was in a document that no-one paid a huge amount of attention to until recently. No, that sentence isn’t from the Lib Dem manifesto (given no-one’s paying attention to that now either). It was from the Tory manifesto, which everyone assumed was only an opening offer for coalition negotiations before the General Election but which David Cameron is now most insistent his party will implement in full. So the answer to the question of whether the Tories will scrap the Lib Dems’ silliest vanity project is only if the Tories think it’s worth dropping a silly commitment in their own manifesto.
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