Southwark Labour’s announcement that it will provide free healthy school meals for all primary school children across the borough was the first of a number of positive key pledges which we believe will deliver us control of the council on May 6.
It is a policy which an increasing number of Labour groups and authorities are supporting – for many of us simply because it reflects the very best of progressive Labour politics. It is a policy which cuts across boundaries of class and income, and addresses the critical problems of childhood obesity and ill health.
Some critics of the policy have said to me that it just benefits middle-class families. But in the present economic climate everyone is feeling the pinch, particularly those who live just above the current free school meals threshold. In Southwark we also believe that it is vitally it important that Labour continues to appeal to middle-class voters – those who helped elect and re-elect a Labour government at three successive general elections and may currently be disaffected – and who will surely welcome a policy which will potentially save them £7 per week per child at a Southwark primary school.
But this is fundamentally a policy which will help poorer families, by removing the stigma and social barriers which continue to be attached to recipients of free school meals and by offering a healthy and nutritious midday meal to those 1,800 pupils who are already entitled to free school meals but do not take advantage of that entitlement. With a recent study by Leeds university showing that only one per cent of packed lunches taken to school contain the nutritional content that a child needs, the rationale for ensuring that children eat a healthy meal at school could not be stronger.
Southwark’s Lib Dem/Tory administration has overseen the borough’s childhood obesity figures rise to shocking levels, so that we now have the worst rates in England. With council tax collection rates the worst in London; our recycling rate the sixth worst in the country; an adult social care service whose performance has plummeted to one of the eight worst in the country, and no plan for how to finish Decent Homes works, it’s little wonder that Southwark’s political executive is even regarded as “dysfunctional” by senior council officers.
But however compelling your critical narrative of any administration may be, there still has to be a positive reason for a voter to support you. The Tories’ failure nationally to offer that positive alternative has left them looking fairly insubstantial – a triumph of spin over substance.
So Southwark Labour’s support for a free school meals policy reflects that desire to offer our residents a positive alternative to the rudderless Lib Dems; a policy to enthuse our activists and supporters; a real reason to vote Labour.
The problem with this proposal is two-fold. It’s wrong in principle to introduce a new middle-class welfare benefit. Even if you had limitless money it would be better to target resources in education on the interventions proven to tackle educational disadvantage. But you don’t have limitless money, so it’s wrong in practice too. The money for this will come out of the education budget – or, if you have identified a transfer, from money which could otherwise be spent on enhancing educational outcomes – one-to-one tuition or bursaries for interns to name a couple.
Middle class families in Southwark want what working class families want – secondary schools to which they would willingly send their children because they offer excellence. I doubt that you have tested this pledge, but if you do I am certain aspirational parents of all classes will tell you that you couldn’t pay them enough to get their kids to eat school meals.
By all means address issues of diet and obesity in your manifesto but remember three things. One, it should surely be your priority to sort out the basics first. As a council tax payer in Southwark I want to know that you have got standards and behaviour in schools right before you start on health policy. Two, it is health policy. And the PCT have trouble with this even though it’s their core business not an optional extra. And that’s because, three, this is not an easy area to intervene in because it is about personal choice. People are obese in Southwark because they choose to have a bad diet and they consume too many calories. There is no lack of information out there, so what is the problem? The truth is we don’t know how to engender behavioural change. Just stop and think how hard it is for you to change any of your own habits and you will start to realise the mountain the state has to climb if it is to have any influence at all on other people’s actions.
Finally, this is the kind of policy I thought we had left behind a long time ago – populist, ineffective and unaffordable. (I’ll still do my leaflet round, though).