Conservative conference: Government considers tapering school meal subsidy

Speaking at a Conservative party conference fringe event, Lord Freud said that the government is considering ways to simplify access to so-called “passported benefits”, including free school meals.

Currently, children become eligible for free school meals when their parents claim one of a number of benefits, but those benefits will cease to exist when universal credit is introduced.

Freud told delegates that the government is working to make sure that families eligible for passported benefits are able to continue claiming support once universal credit comes into force.

He added that the new system could involve “tapering” the financial subsidy for school meals, so that children continue to receive discounted meals as their parents move off benefits and into work.

This would involve “incorporating free school meals and other benefits in a generic passporting element of universal credit”, he said.

“The attraction of that is that we can then taper that support, so that families get the full amount when they are unemployed, but it then tapers away,” he explained.

“It would be an automatic system for schools and would help the kids that miss out now but who could be getting a 50 per cent subsidy toward much cheaper school meals.

“Of course, it would also get rid of all the stigma attached to free school meals, because actually the concept of it being free goes away.”

Freud’s comments came as the Chancellor George Osborne unveiled a further £10bn in cuts from the welfare budget.

Announcing the plans, Osborne said: “It is wrong for someone to be better off on benefits than they would be in work.

“Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour, sleeping off a life on benefits?”

But Una Summerson, head of policy and public affairs at Contact a Family, argued that the family living in that house with their curtains closed in the morning could be caring for a disabled child who had been up all night.

“A lot of the families we work with tell us that they get called ‘work shy’ or ‘scroungers’ by people on the street, because they claim benefits for their disabled child,” she said. “How will universal credit reduce that stigma for some of the most vulnerable families?”