London is handing out free meals for all primary school children | Hacker News Reader

London is handing out free meals for all primary school children

cnn.com

55 pointsBender101 comments

Londoner here. I think those from outside this city, let alone outside this country, would be amazed at the amount of working poor there are here, let alone non-working poor. Yes, it's a 'rich' city, it's also got a lot of the worst poverty in the UK too.

We are in a bad shape generally in the UK, a lot of this country is pretty behind other g8 nations these days on quite a few key development metrics.

I moved out of London about 15 years ago but continued to visit and work there and the difference in such a short amount of time is shocking. The income disparity and cost of living was bad when I lived there and seems to have gotten significantly worse each year. It's bad for Londoners and it's bad for London as it has a sterilising effect on London life and culture.

If I had too guess problems are due to assets inflation (foreign buyers) + hard Brexit instead of staying in trading union like Switzerland.

I think a lot of commonwealth countries are realizing now that allowing questionable foreigners to park their questionably acquired wealth into assets might have artificially have boosted their countries perceived prosperity, but was no substitute to real economic growth based on innovation.

It's a painful to take a look at cities like London and Vancouver and compare them to SF and Seattle.

Yep for sure. Asset inflation caused by things like quantative easing, the poorly-implemented covid furlough scheme and various other 'trickle up' economic policies over the decades, helped to fuel the rampant wealth inequality we see now. A lot of this money goes into property speculation for example. Sky high house prices are in no small part caused by this.

Austerity measures also played a massive part in where we are now. Brexit hasn't helped either.

I had some people visit from London and after seeing my average 2 bedroom apartment in Australia, acted like I must be some kind of multi billionaire. Uh, no, this is what the average person here can afford.

I can’t imagine how bad the standard of living in the Uk has got.

I mean... it's not that bad but everyone has gone down a notch in the last 10-20, years imho.

The only people living in 4+ bed detached / semi detached houses are people with inherited wealth or huge joint incomes. Doctors, senior software engineers, people who work in finance. Your average middle class professionals, teachers, civil servants, lecturers, journalists and so on, will all have gone down a rung in the ladder. They're doing OK, but probably living in a smaller terraced house or maybe a flat.

There are "working poor" in London because benefit systems and uncontrolled immigration allow people with no means to have 3,4 children despite having existed without money to sustain themselves. I can provide a great many examples.

1 in 5 people in England were not born there and in central London boroughs around half (or more) of the populations of various boroughs live in social housing. The poverty you describe is not a result of government indifference to poverty, it's sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.

Uncontrolled immigration to the UK is a myth. If you've ever tried to get permanent residence for a non-EU citizen, you'd know just how controlled it is.

Granted, yes, we had little control over migration from the EU from 2004 to 2016. But very few of London's working poor are of Eastern European heritage - anyone from there who finds it too difficult here tends to head back.

Asylum seekers / "small boats" migrant numbers are absolutely tiny relative to the London population.

London does have a high % of first-generation immigrants - but most of them are now-elderly Caribbeans, South Asians, Mediterraneans, West Africans who came over in the 60s and 70s. Outside of a few areas, non-Anglo-looking people in their 30s and under were overwhelmingly born here.

"the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. This was substantially above pre-pandemic estimates of between 300,000 and 400,000 (depending on which measure is used) " [1]

It's clearly not controlled enough. That's a city approximately the size of Leicester every year. Nobody voted for this.

[1] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo....

The problem with this argument is that completely ignores the die-off rate of the population or the demographics. On average, our population is dieing off at about 600k per year - 500k immigrants does not even break even. We have a negative birth rate. We need new blood - ONS projection for population growth between 2020 and 2045 is under 6%. To compare - mid-1995 and mid-2020 it was just over 15%. We are old-age-heavy which is really bad for the economy and taxation. The mindset should align with data.

So your defense has changed from "it's not happening" to "it's happening and it's a good thing"?

And, for avoidance of doubt, I do think immigration is both a good thing and a necessary thing. Of course, being an immigrant, I am somewhat biased.

It's not a defence. The "new city" per year is a scare mongering tactic that presents only a partial data picture as its basis.

It's a new city every year of only small boat arrivals. As others have pointed out the the wider picture is even more absurd. Largely of people not fleeing war or real conflict or difficulty either. But people who cannot support themselves.

Can you please define how an objective simple piece of data is somehow biased?

For all the flaws of UK democracy, the majority who votes for parties supportive of current immigration levels is vast. So even if you were right nobody explicitly voted for this, opposition to it is weak enough that the vast majority does not see it as a sufficient priority to change their voting patterns.

The English deserve to get what they voted for -- and will get it good and hard.

> Uncontrolled immigration to the UK is a myth

Demonstrably untrue. 1 in 5 people are foreign born. Over six million people received indefinite leave to remain specifically through the brexit process. "Small boat landings" brought a city the size of Canterbury to the UK last year alone fleeing France. Over one million visas were issued last year.

Can you explain what's controlled about small boat landings?

So, I came to the UK when I was 15, studied for over 10 years, got my citizenship. All legal, privately paid for. Incidentally, I worked as a solicitor for over 10 years, large part of my work was immigration law. There is no such thing as "uncontrolled" immigration outside the EU. When we were within the EU, we __chose__ not to enforce the rules. The arguments about it being non-practical (which is what Home Office told MPs select committee) are rubbish - Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands do so successfully from my personal experience. We could have done that too, __if we wanted to__. We just weren't bothered until the rise of UKIP.

Now about being poor. It took me 13 years, 4 of which working in Saudi Arabia, and a career change into software engineering, to make enough money to pay off my debts from school and start earning enough to live on without worrying about the next bill and looking after my wife and kids. Most immigrants I know do work hard. There is also a large swathe of people (immigrants and natives) who for variety of reasons rely on the welfare state. I do agree that welfare state should be downsized significantly. The reality, perhaps surprisingly, is that such a downsizing will hit the natives the most.

> So, I came to the UK when I was 15, studied for over 10 years, got my citizenship. All legal, privately paid for.

Did you pay resident fees or foreign student fees? If you paid resident fees the cost of your education, would have been heavily subsidised by the British tax payer [1] . Given you spent so long in education that will have been a considerable burden. Probably as much as half.

Most people earning less than £40k are a net drain on the Exchequer. An increasingly small percentage of people are propping up the country

[1] https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/01/29/how-much-should-taxpayers-...

International student fees. I did say "all legal, privately paid for"

If you came to the UK when you were 15 how did you end up paying international student fees?

If you were a legal resident of the UK you would not have been liable for international fees.

Jaywick, 97% White, 95% Born in Uk [1]. The most deprived area in England

Search "10 poorest towns in England". There will be no immigrants anywhere. Search "most deprived areas in Europe" and half of them are in Britain. [2] May I remind you that EU also contains Romania and Poland?

Have you looked at GDP per capita of cities? Once you remove London/Oxford/Cambridge, the country is so poor.

Second biggest city in UK is Birmingham, has GDP per capita $30,000. Second biggest city in Germany is Hamburg, has GDP per capita $85,000

You have to compare most of Britain to corrupt, post soviet countries to find comparable standard of living:

Take Prague, Czech republic, GDP PP is $57,000, Double of Birmingham.

So you go to Warsaw, Poland, it was completely destroyed in the war, is really corrupt, still has higher GDP than Birmingham, $32,000.

North & East Ayrshire has GDP €16,200. You might as well live in Siberia! Yakutia has GDP of $18,000 [5]

> The poverty you describe is... sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.

Yes, I guess you could pursue the plan of starving poor to death, do a rerun of Ireland 1850's

London is fucked because housing. Housing in London is fucked because most of UK provides living standards of Poland.

References: 1- https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/eastofengland/essex/E340... 2 - https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwall-sec...

5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Ru...

Czech Republic and Poland are neither post-soviet nor particularly corrupt

1 in 5 people in England where born outside the country because the population is below replacement rate especially when you consider people leaving the UK.

You need a large percentage of the population to have 3-4 kids to be a sustainable country.

The idea that any industrialized country has "uncontrolled immigration" is itself not reflective of reality.

> because

Explain the causal effect especially apropos small boat arrivals behind this apparently inevitable gravitational force

Remove all immigrants and children of immigrants from the UK and it would have an extremely old population. As in median age of ~60+ in dire economic straits which would push everyone who could to abandon the country. Small boat arrivals are a trivial number of people irrelevant to this discussion.

You can’t have both negative population growth and 300,000+ people leaving the country every year for very long without massive issues. And those massive issues are going to push even more people to leave resulting in even more issues. Which would effectively force the country to promote immigration even if it doesn’t want immigrants the UK needs them.

Alternatively, if the population growth rate was positive then the country wouldn’t have nearly the need for immigrants to be stable.

Maybe, many of those natives leaving every year do so because of the extra competition with the immigrants: bringing people over causes lower salaries and higher costs of housing.

What's worse is that, those leaving presumably are capable of making it in "better" economies. So in pure GDP-per capita-producing terms, you just exchanged some natives for worse performers.

That's what happens when you're not in the top of the totem of the immigration market.

The majority of people leaving the UK were immigrants themselves.

It’s fairly common globally for immigrants to then move to another country. But that’s been especially true in the EU.

  According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the year ending June 2020, an estimated 673,000 people emigrated from the UK. This includes both UK-born and non-UK-born individuals. Of the total emigrants, approximately 316,000 (47%) were UK-born, and approximately 357,000 (53%) were non-UK-born. The non-UK-born emigrants included both non-British citizens and British citizens who were born outside the UK.

So it's almost 50/50. Looks actually worse than I'd imagined.

Yes, though 2020 was a real outlier for hopefully obvious reasons.

The 2019 breakdown was 397k emigrants of which 131k where British, 151k EU, and 115k non-EU.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

It’s going to be interesting to see how things settle down in a post Brexit and COVID UK.

There is a labor shortage in the UK and unemployment is the lowest in 40 years, so all those people should be able to find jobs.

At the same time a job at Pret pays £20k / year and you can’t really find a room in London for less than £700 / month.

UK birth rates are far below replacement. The UK would face economic collapse without significant immigration.

Even if we can increase the quantity of migration, if we aren't able to compete for the highest skilled migrants or keep our own young people in the country by offering them jobs as highly paid as other english-speaking places (e.g. the US, Australia, etc) with lowish taxes that allow them to build wealth, we're very likely to face serious economic problems supporting the public services we have through the ongoing demographic transition.

That is true. For the time being the UK is still able to sidestep this because there's a supply of well educated English speakers in an increasing number of African countries for whom the UK remains attractive (e.g. the UK is significantly increasing the cost of educating nurses for a lot of third world countries because the UK fails to educate enough of its own), but it will be harder and harder as competition for immigrants heats up.

"The UK would face economic collapse without significant immigration."

Demographics of our country guarantee a demographic collapse. Not as bad as say Japan or Germany, but enough of an impact to maintain wage inflation. The level of immigration that would be required to reverse that is currently not acceptable to our electorate (in the main). Which is unfortunate.

Why isn’t the solution raising native English birth rates?

If you know a reliable way of doing so without imposing poverty or massive authoritarianism there are dozens of governments which would pay vast amounts of money for your expertise.

I don’t think that’s true, but if any actually are, I’m happy to help for a moderate fee plus costs.

What I see though are governments which oppress their people to the point of illness, the way abused animals stop procreating — and then rather than confront that behavior in themselves, buy replacements they subsequently abuse the same way.

Not a single country has found a working method, despite attempts at extending welfare, and extensive financial benefits.

But ignoring that, the end result is the same whether people can't or won't figure out how to do it: immigration is an increasing necessity, and as more and more countries tip below replacement it will lead to increasingly desperate measures to compete for it.

With respect to oppression, the two most consistent factors correlating with falling birth rates is higher education and increased wealth.

I'll be cynic, but basically this:

A manual laborer start to get productive at 16, and stop after 50, depending on his form.

So basically, you avoid paying for his education, he is productive right away, and with some luck, he will retire in his country (or the state may deport him) and die there.

Not saying it's good, but that's the way the world work right now.

You would be surprised, but that was the plan in 50s and 70s, when we got a people from Pakistan and South East Asia to come to work in the factories. They did not go back and settled here. The actual result is that they stay here and bring their families and contribute. Which is great, in my opinion.

Imported labour is cheaper.

I am an immigrant to Britain, and I am sad for Britain, and I am said about moving to Britain. It is really hard to describe.

before I moved to Britain I thought it's a rich country, but actually it's a poor country with one rich city (London + Oxford/Cambridge)

GDP of London is $66,000. Second biggest city in UK is Birmingham, has GDP per capita $30,000. I have wasted 10 years in that god-forsaken place. Birmingham is not unique, Manchester, Glasgow, and other big cities are withing ~15% error margin.

Second biggest city in Germany is Hamburg, has GDP per capita $85,000. To find a city in Germany that is as poor as Birmingham, you have to go to the 4th poorest city, Oberhausen [1], population 200K, rank 59 by size and rank 104 by GDP.

UK even loses comparison to post-soviet countries - Prague, Czech republic, GDP PP is $57,000, Double of Birmingham. Bratislava, Slovatia - $45,000. Warsaw, Poland - $32,000

And that's average. Then there are some truly god-forsaken places like North & East Ayrshire, has GDP €16,200. I don't even know how that's possible, Yakutia, Siberia has GDP of $18,000

Brexit vote was about stopping immigrants from getting in, British people do not realise they should be the ones getting out. You could hand an average non-london Britton a ticket to a random European capital their standard of living would improve.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP#:...

I lived for several years in Cambridge and then several years in Manchester and then several years in Glasgow and then several years in London and then several years in Oxford and then several years in ... Each city was the best time in my life, including ... :)

You speak of my country with disgust and it offends me.

You know what's kept those wages outside London so low?

I am sorry if any of it came across as disguist.

I am feeling very compassionate to people that have suffered tremendous economic mismanagement.

I have seen people get offended at the suggestion that maybe some 'lesser' fountries are doing better, and we can learn from them. Even compairing Britain to Poland was disrespectfull to them.

> You know what's kept those wages outside London so low?

My guess would be, lowest public investment in the regions in OECD?

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/uk-near-bottom-oecd-rankings-nat...

Also 'native' white British poor people get treated like crap?

Look at british TV shows - Benefit Street, Villabising poor people. Or how much educational outcomes are 70% predicted by parents income.

It sounds you moved out, if so where to?

This is politics, so not really HN content, but it is great news and should be nation wide and more common across the globe.

Studies, including the UK government's own study (from the last government) showed that there was significant improvement in attainment for pupils from lower income backgrounds and also general health improvements. For about £400 per pupil per year you can create significant benefits for children and therefore future adults.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...

Aren't you concerned that there are people having children who refuse to feed them?

> For about £400 per pupil per year you can create significant benefits for children and therefore future adults

Parents used to feed their children when I grew up. What's changed? And if that's the case why is childhood obesity soaring in the same areas that so desperately need money to feed children?

There are over 10million school age children. So your very conservative estimate of £400 is £4bn that has to be found year on year.

> Parents used to feed their children when I grew up. What's changed? And if that's the case why is childhood obesity soaring in the same areas that so desperately need money to feed children?

Fast food is now a fraction of the cost of healthy food.

Cost of living has been steadily increasing (and more recently, more suddenly increasing) while wages have remained stagnant. Home ownership rates have declined, resulting in more people paying to keep a roof over their head instead of investing in their own future equity. Instead of having any security to support their families, they’re paying significant %s more in prepay utility services.

> Fast food is now a fraction of the cost of healthy food.

No it isn't. If you would like to discuss specifically that I'm more than happy to demonstrate.

So your argument is these starving children are victims of cheap ultra high calorie fattening food and so need free food to stop them from hunger?

> Home ownership rates have declined, resulting in more people paying to keep a roof over their head instead of investing in their own future equity.

Spinning easily disproved tropes of victimhood. Over the timescale claimed you are saying that people are being forced out of homes?

> Fast food is now a fraction of the cost of healthy food.

So are they feeding them fast food or not?

> Parents used to feed their children when I grew up. What's changed?

Nothing, you probably just lived in your bubble. Kids have a very narrow view of what reality is

Poverty has been linked to obesity for a while now, feel free to google it. It's a form of malnutrition, not a form of food abundance, poverty doesn't mean you can't buy food, it means you probably are more prone to looking for a quick feel good food because the rest of your existence isn't very fulfilling, it means you probably don't have a fully equipped kitchen, it means you can't afford fresh food, it means you're more likely to buy processed food of dubious nutritional value, &c.

> £4bn that has to be found year on year.

That's not even 10% of your military budget. Building a strong and healthy population should be high on the list of priorities, the saving in term of public health would more than pay for it

> That's not even 10% of your military budget.

Why do you consider it a reasonable argument that more money can be spent on something because some money is spent on something else. Why stop there. Arbitrary amounts of money for every cause. Why not have government feed all the population. Like Cuba hand out beans and rice to the population.

Yes why not?

Ah. I see. We will soon spend £200bn pa on the NHS. Just spend another £200bn on it.

Why not?

I was responding to the free food for all, that sounds pretty good to me, checks the moral and ethical boxes (let me just double check...yup that seems right). It doesn't viscerally offend me, maybe I should see a doctor?

Paid for by?

The doctor? The government, atleast where I'm from. I may actually go see him tomorrow

People browsing this thread finding appalling comments - it’s not a pattern, it’s just this one person.

Care to elaborate?

It would be much better if everyone had a better income and work/life balance in order to be able to feed, house, clothe and raise their children well but that is not the reality of the situation or where the current political and economics climate in the UK is leading, it is quite the opposite.

I know people who work full time and yet can only afford to have their heating on for 1 or 2 hours a day in winter and have a very tight budget for groceries. There are people who have to choose between heating and eating. Ensuring that children eat at least one good meal a day is an easier & quicker fix than the systemic and governmental change that the UK needs to solve this problem the other way.

This isn't about "school-age" children; it's about primary pupils. That's under-11s. We're not talking about feeding hulking 17-year-olds.

Does a child stop being hungry when they turn 13? I thought they were starving to death up until aged 11/12?

In New York City all kids in the public school system qualify for free meals. No questions asked. From Pre-K to 12th grade. I believe this has been going on since 2019. During Covid, since kids could not go to school, all kids (or rather their parents) received some debit cards that could be used to buy food.

California has started this as well. Free breakfast and lunch to 100% of students in the state across all grades regardless of income or anything else (first state in the country to do so I believe). It's bizarre to me that this isn't already the standard. India has been successfully doing it for two decades now, and the program now covers 120 million children.

I was impressed by this announcement. It was accompanied by reports of:

* Teachers bringing in packed lunches for pupils who routinely arrived at school with none

* Pupils pretending to have a packed lunch, because they didn't want to be stigmatized as poor because they got a free school meal

You can't learn if you're hungry. Teachers can't teach if there's even a few hungry pupils in the class; they become disruptive. If everybody's fed, then everybody wins.

The bureaucracy around means-tested benefits is itself costly; in some cases, it costs more than the marginal cost of making the benefit universal. These people are not "scroungers" - they're children under 8. It's common sense.

Primary school here is until 12 (Year 6)

Yeah, I checked that after posting; I was wrong. Thanks!

I like Mayor Sadiq Khan, he's had an extremely hostile opposing government, one that's made him beg for funding for the public transport system and one that's changed the entire Mayoral electoral system from a fair-ish one to a very unfair one, and various policing crises that get laid at his door, so nice to see him using his business tax windfall to help school kids when the government won't.

Plus a pandemic.

Further context: yes, it's the mayoral elections this year.

Even further context: while some boroughs do offer blanket free meals, most don't and during the school holidays in the pandemic, many children were going without a decent meal as the goverment voted to not provide them. My partner and many others stepped up in our borough along with the local rugby club who made the meals to deliver to children and families in need.

> yes, it's the mayoral elections this year.

Pretty sure it's not until mid 2024?

May 2024. https://metro.co.uk/2023/02/20/when-is-the-next-london-mayor...

Edit: downvoted for sharing information. :facepalm:

Ah yes, I'm a year early, thanks for pointing it out.

I despise Khan.

Elite-accepted Populist with aggressive net-zero policies that are driving down low-income self-employed workers.

-- in uk school lunch is not free? - this is typical lunch every school child in Korea provided free daily - thought this was usual in developed countries? --

https://imgur.com/a/8KECVAp

We used to have free milk, but Thatcher got rid of that (Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher).

One challenge in the UK, especially somewhere like London, is we have a fair amount of diversity in food choices.

Providing nutritious, tasty meals on a very limited budget with options for vegan, vegetarian, kosher, halal, gluten free and other diets can be a challenge for schools, and many primary schools are quite small without cooking facilities. When I was young, it was normal in primary to bring a "packed lunch" from home, usually a sandwich and crisps. The standard UK lunch as an adult is still a sandwich for most people. The move towards free cooked school meals has been suggested because turns out that many don't have access to a daily healthy cooked meal at home.

BTW kosher = halal, both have almost the same requirements.

Around 20% of kids get school meals for free whether it's being under a certain age or in a household under a certain income, but in most cases, no, school lunches aren't free. As a parent, I am aware that some kids, mostly in secondary education, will buy snacks for their friends or share their lunch with them if they can't afford it every day.

I went to school in the 80’s and 90’s in Canada (suburbs of Toronto) and school lunch was not free. The primary school did not have facilities to prepare lunch, and high school had a pay-as-you-go cafeteria. I don’t know if things have changed.

Same in the suburbs of Quebec.

However we had decently cheap lunch, and above all even cheaper breakfast provided by the Petits Déjeuners, for which I am very grateful.

I only realised later that my parents struggled at times, and that those were lifesavers for them.

> The primary school did not have facilities to prepare lunch

The normal response to that is to use a contract or municipal service to bring in hot food. It's usually municipal.

Where do I sign up that looks delicious.

A lot of countries seem to manage to provide really good school lunches. Totally unlike, say, the US, where it's usually crap and has gradually been getting worse.

I think it all but requires some existing, quality-valuing food culture. Try to serve good lunches to kids here and you'd have all the parents crying about how their kids "can't" eat that and need an Uncrustable and chocolate milk instead or whatever.

It’s programs like this that actually fill me with hope - that taxpayer money is used for something directly helpful to the people. I’d love to see similar progressive assistance enacted in more districts.

Ideally, it will be subject to accountability, and the service will not be outsourced to some cheap company employing the lowest quality labor serving the lowest quality food.

I have seen that, and I would like the government to specify that all schools need to have kitchens or a central kitchen staffed by people employed by the government.

Completely short term. It's a band-aid at best.

It's just food, we have plenty of it. What's a long term and non band-aid solution to let children eat?

Basically anything that enables their parents to feed them again instead. Nobody like taking handouts and they'd much rather take care of their own families instead.

Help them prosper via various different means and they'll be happier and healthier than taking government handouts 1 day at a time.

Handouts are great and make our community better! I like taking handouts, and I love when the community, through guaranteed services, provides help taking care of my family.

I love the government handouts that pay for road maintenance right up to my home. And bus service so I don’t need to buy a car. I also love the public library near me, which is a handout that gives my community a rich place to go and participate in arts and reading groups without requiring me to spend a penny!

Handouts can help people prosper, and specifically children have no say in whether their parents have the means or motivation to meet their needs. We should help children prosper regardless of their parents, which means schools should provide free meals, laundry service, childcare for students’ younger siblings, etc. What “different means” would help students prosper than ensuring their needs are met?

Feeding children is a proven way of increasing the educational attainment, and by extension in the long run enables more (future) parents to prosper.

> Nobody like taking handouts and they'd much rather take care of their own families instead.

This hypothesis has been demonstrably untrue for a long time now. UN reports from 2019-2022 consistently found Finland and Denmark to be the two happiest countries on Earth [1] and their governments provide some of the strongest welfare programs of any country [2].

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model#Nordic_welfare_...

> Nobody like taking handouts and they'd much rather take care of their own families instead.

Interesting; what are the sample size and 95% confidence intervals on the study you're citing?

> Help them prosper via various different means

Erm... that's exactly what's happening? This is not the entirety of the UK's economic policy.

> Nobody like taking handouts and they'd much rather take care of their own families instead.

That's a big part of why this provision is to be universal. You can't feel bad about taking "handouts" if all your fellow pupils are also getting it.

And let children go to school without food ? Sometimes the short term solution is necessary

If it is made into a permanent policy then it is long term.

It’s amazing to me how mismanaged “the church” has been the last 60 or so years. This is the kind of thing they owned (feed poor people) for centuries as it legitimized their influence. You still see it in many parts of the world. It’s as if they became more obsessed with their own internal affairs and politics they didn’t bother to notice that a political wing was subverting them by taking their job. It’s no coincidence we see so much moralizing and other quasi-religious posture from them. They’ve been better managed then and have eaten the church’s lunch.

Good to see some sane development. In no rich country should kids go hungry. We in Poland have 500PLN/month ($250 PPP) per kid and that’s very good program in my opinion. Free meals in schools were always there for poor kids but IMO it’s always rewards people who hide their income and disincentivises work so I like this universal approach better. I think we currently have dollar-for-dollar support, if you get some income you get less support which fixes some of issues with hard support line.

Hopefully this does what is intended. Similar programs in the States generate huge amounts of waste because the food must be provided for all students who qualify, yet a large portion does not get eaten and gets thrown away. At least this is the case in my local district

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