Meeting of the Parliament 11 September 2024
I should start by thanking the Conservatives, not just for using some of their time this afternoon to debate free school meals, but because the topics of their debates are a defence of green policies from the Bute house agreement era. I am delighted that, having spent so long trying to bring down the Bute house agreement, our Conservative colleagues are now the first to defend the legacy of the Greens in Government.
I will try to be collegiate, but I need to start by making the point that there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the Conservatives talking about ways in which we can tackle child poverty. The single biggest driver of child poverty in modern British history is the Conservative Party and the decisions that it has made, whether it be introducing the two-child cap, slashing universal credit or decimating public services. They cannot pick and choose when they want to lift children out of poverty and when they want to push more children into it without accusations of hypocrisy being flung at them.
On that point of collegiality and consensus, I want to talk about a visit in the previous parliamentary session that Oliver Mundell and I and some other colleagues made to multiple schools in Finland, which has had universal free school meals for some time. It was an experience that we all gained a great deal from. We saw almost every pupil sitting together and staying in school at lunch time for a healthy, warm, free meal. That did a whole range of things. It tackled inequality and helped those families who needed it and who would have struggled with paying for school meals. It improved attainment, because hungry children struggle to learn and behave. It eliminated stigma, because we know that, even with the best will in the world and with the most subtle systems of means testing and entitlement, children can find out who is and is not entitled to a free school meal. Even if they do not find out, those children who are entitled under our current system are worried about people—even members of staff—knowing that their family’s situation means that they are entitled. No one misses out under a universal system.
The Finland system also increases social cohesion, because, as we saw, all children eat together, including the children of families who can afford to pay for meals but who otherwise would have probably gone out of school at lunchtime. A very different culture is created as a result of universal provision. Finland is the gold standard. It is all the proof and all the evidence that we need that universal provision works.
It is outrageous that, here in Scotland and across the UK, we have children sitting in school hungry in one of the richest countries in the history of the planet. I am proud that, during the final budget agreement of the previous parliamentary session, just a few weeks before the pandemic brought a lot to a halt, the Scottish Greens managed to secure the Government’s agreement to immediately expand universal provision of free school meals to primary 4 and 5 and then move on to primary 6 and 7.
That was part of a wider package that we worked on together with colleagues in the SNP to do things such as cancel school meal debt. The Scottish Greens were the first to uncover the scale of school meal debt in Scotland. We did the research, we campaigned and then, with the support of the cabinet secretary and the then First Minister, Humza Yousaf, we secured funding to cancel that debt.
This afternoon’s debate is a bit odd, because we are debating something that we all agree on. The real question is about money. I agree with Liam Kerr that it is a question of priorities, although his priorities and mine are very different. I believe that the Greens have proposals for making the scheme financially affordable. For a start, there are ways of minimising costs using shared catering facilities and timetabling.
The problem that I have with the Government’s amendment is that it presents, quite rightly, the scale of austerity delivered by the Conservative Party—and not reversed by the Labour Party—as a challenge. However, it then makes out that that challenge makes austerity inevitable. It is not inevitable. There are a range of ways in which the Scottish Government can save money in-year in this financial year. On the capital side, we would freeze spending on trunk roads and motorway expansion. On the revenue side, we would scale back on tax breaks for shooting estates, for example. It is a question of political choice. I want to hear more about the choices that all colleagues would make this afternoon if we genuinely had a consensus on the priority of delivering the policy.
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