This is all very much welcome food for my ears, as I've been arguing the case for universal free school meals in one way or another for quite a while. So, I really do welcome the level of agreement across the three parties on the importance of this issue. There is some disagreement at the edges, which we could hammer out in due course. But I think, picking up on some of the points that have already been made—for example, Suzy Davies questions whether parents who are not eligible for free school meals should pay for the wraparound care that they are effectively getting by enabling their children to attend the free school breakfasts. I think we need to acknowledge that many parents are using it as childcare, but, equally, the wraparound care that the free school breakfast provides does also enable them to go out to work. It can often be the game changer that enables them to take jobs and still be better off. 

So, I think there's a great deal of merit in what has been said before, but I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done to really make this happen, because we can't simply just turn on the horticultural tap overnight, and we need to gear up our public procurement services to really work out exactly how much is needed by which school, as well as ensuring that we've got properly skilled and trained-up cooks to cook the nourishing freshly prepared meals that this assumes, because there's no point in having free school meals for all primary school children, for example, if the quality of those meals is so poor that a lot of them opt out with their feet. 

As Siân Gwenllian has already said, enabling everybody to have a free school meal really does eliminate the stigma that currently stops a lot of people who are entitled to free school meals from taking it up. And others are unaware of the benefits that they would be entitled to if they could trust people enough to reveal just how little they are living on. And there is no doubt that the poverty we see all around us is going to get worse as a result of the pandemic and the disruption caused by a very abrupt leaving of the European Union.

I just want to talk about the pilots of universal free school meals that have taken place in England, because they reinforce, having done it, the benefits of this. So, Islington was the pioneer, where, by the way, I used to be a councillor many, many years ago. But that inspired the UK Labour Government to start pilots of free school meals for all primary school pupils in Newham in London, in Wolverhampton, and in Durham. And both in Newham and in Durham, the results were really significant, because the take-up of school meals rose from just under 50 per cent to now 87 per cent in one area, and 85 per cent in Durham. As you would expect, many more children were eating vegetables at lunch. It was up by a fifth. And there was a steep decline in the items associated with packed lunches, i.e. sandwiches, soft drinks and crisps. Sandwiches are a catch-all for all manner of things; they can be very nutritious, or they can be atrociously not. But soft drinks and crisps have almost no nutritional value whatsoever.

But I think, academically, what was really interesting was that students were on average two months ahead of their peers in schools who weren't in receipt of this benefit. And it had a bigger effect on literacy levels than the introduction of the compulsory literacy hour in 1998. So, it had a massive impact on children's literacy attainment, and the improvements were most marked amongst children from the less affluent families. But in addition to that, it actually saw a major improvement in academic performance across all subjects, and this is hardly surprising, because children can't be concentrating if they're hungry. And we all have stories of children who absolutely are starving when they turn up in school on Monday morning, and need to be fed, and are fed, by teachers who take them seriously.

I think the thing we really need to home in on is the cost. Because the Soil Association has calculated that, if we assumed that the cost of the meal was £1.76, for pupils aged five to 10, it would cost about £82 million for universal free school meals, whereas another calculation was that it would be over £100 million. We really do need to tie this down, but I think that, if we all have a commitment to introduce universal free school meals for all primary schools in the next Parliament, then we would ensure that it was introduced, gradually and in line with the foundational economy and the well-being of future generations Act.