This isn't just a school meals service for some kids it could be a lifeline.

 

Over the next few weeks councils across the UK will be setting their budget for the year to come. In these difficult times it is a glum business of counting beans and cutting costs. The public are 'consulted ', mostly for form's sake because belts have to be tightened come what may.

 

This process is talking place in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent just now and the local press is drip feeding we the public with the bad news.

 

Reading through the resulting copy I came across a story that wasn't about what was going to be cut so much as what would be retained, at a price.

 

Under this year's budget proposals schools across the city will be charged an extra 6p for every meal provided for them by the City Catering service. A small rise that would raise an extra £140,000 next year, rising to £210,000 in 2022.

 

Speaking to the Sentinel Janine Bridges, council cabinet member for education told the  children and young people overview and scrutiny  committee this week, echoing a TV advert of a few years ago that 'the City Catering service is not just a school meals service, this is a top of the range schools food'.

 

A service that, she added, works with the Soil Association and 'endeavours to provide top of the range schools meals'. A far cry then from the boiled to death veg and meat of indeterminate origin familiar from my own school days then.

 

Here is the run though, as councillor Bridges told the committee to 'sustain this high-quality service, we must modernize some of the equipment, we must increase the of staff'. She added this added that she felt the children of our city deserve a quality school food service because for many, too many, children the  meal they get at school ' is the only good nutritious meal they're going to get'.

 

I agree, the question is if schools have to pay more for the meals they provide, for now much longer will they able to provide them? The Sentinel reported that 'council chiefs believe schools will be able to absorb these costs without passing them on to pupils who by school meals'.

 

That seems to be an overly optimistic view to say the least. In an education sector that has long since welcomed the market in a cost is something that exists only to be cut. The sharp operators will do so by moving to a cheaper supplier; the really sharp ones will find a way to raise the price in the process.

 

Either way families who are struggling to get by are going to get a raw deal. If schools move to a cheaper supplier their kids will get fed turkey Twizzlers; if the price goes up, they might not get fed at school at all.

 

Food poverty and poverty in general is a real problem and one that wrecks lives across the UK. There are, according to figures produced by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) 14.5million people living in poverty, 8% to 9% of whom stay there for longer than two years with a devastating impact on their life chances.

 

Out of those 8.4million struggle to put food on the table, 13% of the people in this sorry situation are in paid work. The Victorian nightmare of begin one of the working poor has become a reality again in the twenty first century (Sustain/ JRF).

 

Poverty is an awful thing for an adult to endure, impacting on their physical health and mental wellbeing; for a child it is even worse. The Child Poverty Action Group estimated that in 2018/19 4.2million children were living in poverty, 72% of whom were in families where at least one person was in work.

 

That pandemic has made what was an already bad situation so much worse, as the JRF put it it has battered the labour market. Many people have seen their jobs and incomes vanish, those lucky enough to be on furlough fear theirs may be next.

 

The impact can be seen in the fact that the Trussell Trust, the charity which runs most food banks in England gave out 1.2million emergency food parcels in the first six months, 2600 going to children every day.

 

This, you might say, is a long way from schools in Stoke having to pay more for the meals they serve, only it isn't. The kids with parents who can't afford a hike in dinner money are often the ones who received emergency food -parcels. Either that or they are walking the poverty line like a tightrope and may fall off at any moment.

 

It is an inevitably of budgeting that schools will pass costs on to parents, so the council need to think before passing costs on to them. Every child deserves a decent meal at least once a day, this seemingly small change could deny it to some. Pulling away a vital lifeline in the process.