Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 13 January 2021.
Llywydd, I did undertake in Finance Committee on Friday to write to the committee with the full detail in terms of the modelling that we have undertaken to explore the cost of extending free school meals, and I'll be certain to share it also with Rhun ap Iorwerth as well as the Finance Committee to give that level of detail. Of course, this issue was raised again with the First Minister in First Minister's questions just this week, and he did make the challenge—which I think is a completely legitimate one—in the sense that if we are going to look at spending tens of millions of additional pounds on this particular initiative—and, of course, there's a very strong argument for supporting families in this way—then we do need to explore where in the budget we would take that funding from. So, I think that we do have to have both sides of that coin when we're making these choices, but I will share that information as soon as I'm able to.