I listened with great interest to Laura Jones say, 'If families can afford to feed their children, they should have the freedom to do so as they wish.' I think not. We can't actually stand by if a family is not feeding their child a nutritious diet willingly and knowingly and with the ability to do something about it. That is simply not possible. And the consequences, as we have seen, of poor diet are what is clogging up our hospitals, because of the long-term consequences of poor diet. And as Luke Fletcher, indeed, pointed out, it has very serious short-term and long-term consequences for the ability of the child to learn as well as the obesity epidemic and diabetes and all the other things that go with that. I agree that the midday meal that Mike Hedges talked about really should be the main meal of the day for a child. It is really not great for them to be having that meal in the evening; they need to be having it in the middle of the day when they're running around, using up and needing to burn up a lot of their calories.

But politics is the art of the possible and, at the moment, there is a £50 million difference in the cost calculations of the Bevan Foundation and the calculations of the Welsh Government on what it would cost to introduce free school meals for all children on universal credit. I'm well aware that the accounting errors may occur, but £50 million is not far short of the fine of £70 million imposed on Southern Water for its criminal discharge of raw sewage into the rivers and seas of Kent and Sussex. It would be great, wouldn't it, if the malpractice of irresponsible companies that poison children could be used to feed hungry children in our schools, but that is not the way things work. If Plaid is really serious about the issue and is a responsible party, you have to make clear what you're going to cut to find the money for funding universal free school meals, and I need to know what the answer is to that in your summing up. I appreciate that Plaid is a recent convert to the important issue of free school meals, but to continue to demand that we throw money at the problem without displaying much acknowledgement of the complexity of this issue is not good enough. It is not a simple good-versus-bad answer. We know from amendment 1 that the Welsh Government is exploring all the options, starting with tying down the cost implications, and that is just a start.

I need to know how many pupils are currently receiving a nutritious school lunch at all. In my constituency, it's not that many, simply because it is very difficult to deliver lunch in the dining room of a school without completely busting the bubble arrangements. We know, instead, that most families are being asked to send pupils to school with a packed lunch—how nutritious are those packed lunches? I appreciate that it's difficult to visit schools but I bet that many of them consist of a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar because I've seen it on countless occasions. 

The 33,000 rise in the take-up of free school meals during the pandemic is to be welcomed. We need to know a great deal more, however, about whether this has been inspired by the injection of cash into family bank accounts, which, of course, is the most dignified way of supporting poor families, rather than grab bags being provided and which continue to be provided by some local authorities. In the past, how much effort have local schools put into ensuring that families were signing up to the service that their children were entitled to? How much is that due to stigma and how much is it children actually refusing to eat the school lunches that are being served because they prefer to sit in the lunch break with their friends who are having packed lunches or they want to go and play games? I have experience, definitely, that people on free school meals are simply eating chips because that's all they will eat—not a good use of public funds.

What about these free school breakfasts? We hope that the change in the regulations on bubbling will, indeed, allow them to be reinstated in September, but this is not a service for hungry children as much as a service for working parents. We know that from the school census data back in January 2020—a million miles ago. We can all deplore the proposed £20 cut in universal credit, but if we peg our free school meal eligibility to the actions of the UK Government who we have no control over, what could that be setting us up for in terms of control of our own budget? If they knew that all our children were getting a free school meal, would Rishi Sunak then reduce the amount of money that was coming to families on universal credit? This is a hugely complicated issue, and we have to work really hard, collectively, to get this one right.