I'll be voting against the Plaid motion today because I am opposed to universal free school meals. I do not believe that providing free school meals to children who are being privately educated is the right thing to do or the right use of resources—if you look at your motion there, it says 'all'; it doesn't say 'all in the public sector', it says 'all' and 'all' includes those in private education—not now, and not in the future. But if Plaid Cymru returned with a motion that said 'amend the eligibility criteria for free school meals so that all school pupils in families receiving universal credit or equivalent benefit are eligible, and permanently extend free school meals entitlement to pupils in families with no recourse to public funds', I will vote for it. 

Sometimes, a debate can be simplified into right and wrong. It is right to extend free school meals to children on universal credit and those with no recourse to public funds. It is wrong not to do so. The Labour Party was created to stand up for the poor and exploited in society. Children will go hungry. In working-class communities such as mine, the meal at around midday is called 'dinner'—to many children, the main meal of the day. Too many children go to bed hungry at night. One good meal a day makes a huge difference to a child. Also, being hungry affects educational attainment.

The right to food is protected in the UK by the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights. The convention on the rights of the child also reiterate the UK's responsibility to ensure all children have an adequate standard of living, including the right to food. While the UK has ratified both conventions, it has not enshrined them in domestic law, unfortunately. This means they cannot be legally enforced in the UK courts. Nevertheless, hunger in childhood is a human rights violation that our Government has an obligation to address using the maximum resources it has available. The right to food is also about ensuring that all people are able to access food in a dignified way.

I'm sure the Government will mention cost and the difficulty affording it. I've listened intently for over a year now when we've been told that we have the most generous financial support amongst all the British nations for businesses during the pandemic. We have provided business rate relief to smaller food retailers. We have engaged in finding money to support demand-side housing that's inflating housing prices. We have provided substantial support for economic schemes that could never work. It's not that we've invested in them and they were a possibility, and we were a bit unlucky. I won't name them now but I can name some that could never work; they were just not possible to work. 

So, I remain completely unconvinced that this is not affordable. In fact, we've just talked about £75 million for active travel. Now, this is where you come down to priorities. Would you prefer to see that money spent on active travel or on feeding schoolchildren? I'm on feeding schoolchildren, and I think that that is when you come down to what are your priorities. So, I'm really unconvinced that this is not affordable.

One of the main reasons that so many in our society live in hardship and that so many cannot afford food is because we live in a system embedded in structural inequality. And let's be fair, the Welsh Government have been very critical of universal credit cuts, very rightly so, and they've blamed the Conservatives fairly regularly, if not very regularly, for cutting universal credit by £20, and that is wrong. But it's equally as wrong not to feed children who are on universal credit, even more so now when universal credit has been cut by £20. And we've got a punitive benefits system, sanctions on those reliant on benefits, and a five-week wait for universal credit. That's why many children and families have no recourse to public money; they're waiting that five weeks to get their universal credit. They have no money coming in from anywhere. How they're meant to survive, I'm not quite sure. 

The minimum wage was supposed to provide enough for a family to live off. Unfortunately, it's not the real living wage, and I've bored you in here more than once talking about how important the real living wage is, so I won't do that now. Did you in Plaid Cymru add that third item about providing free school meals that includes children in private schools in order to stop any Labour Members voting for it? If you did, you've probably been very successful if that was the aim. But providing free school meals for pupils whose parents are on universal credit and who have no recourse to public funds is one of the things the Labour Party was created to do. If we cannot do that, why do we exist?