Lib Dems welcome free school meals expansion and call for further action

York’s Lib Dem councillors have welcomed the news that the Government is adopting Liberal Democrat party policy in expanding free school meals eligibility to all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit from September 2026 and are calling for further action to tackle child poverty. 

For the first three years of school, every child in England gets a free hot dinner. But from Year 3 onwards, millions of children miss out on a healthy lunch at school. At the 2024 General Election the Lib Dems committed to extend free school meals to all children in poverty for primary and secondary schools, with an ambition to extend them to all primary school children when the public finances allow. 

In York, Labour won control of the council in 2023 on the back of a pre-election promise to “get free school meals to all primary school children” and Deputy Leader Cllr Pete Kilbane stated at a council meeting in February 2023 that “we have the very well-known organisations that will put the funding in.” Estimated at around £3m-£4million pounds this would not have been affordable by the council on its own and Liberal Democrats said that this would require national government funding, and this has proved to be the case.

The reality however is that universal free school lunches have so far only been made available to children at one school in the city where the budget covered 60 additional meals per day.

Lib Dem spokesperson for children, young people and education, Cllr Andrew Waller, has welcomed the Government’s decision to adopt Lib Dem party policy on free school meals and has called for further action to tackle child poverty.

“Today’s welcome announcement is a recognition that provision of free school lunches for every child in poverty in York is not something that the Council can pay for, it needs to be a properly-funded national scheme. The Secretary of State on the Radio 4 Today programme ruled out auto-enrolment for young people who will now be eligible for free school meals - this is a missed opportunity and I hope she will reconsider this decision. I also hope she can provide clarity on whether all young people in a household on Universal Credit will be eligible, or just the first two children in line with the two-child benefit cap.

“The Government needs to go further and scrap the previous Conservative Government’s two-child benefit cap. This would be the most cost-effective way of lifting over 250,000 children across the UK out of poverty and it’s disappointing that the Government has not yet committed to scrapping this punishing policy.

“Now would also be a good time for the York Labour administration to apologise for having made a pre-election promise to provide free school lunches for all primary school children, a promise which was never deliverable.”