Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend in her endeavours with this amendment. We worked on child maintenance together in the department. It became a real campaign. We were turning every stone to ensure that money that was due to children got to them. I could keep your Lordships here all night with the tricks that people played to avoid paying their maintenance, although I will not. It was truly shameful that people whose relationship had broken down were taking it out on the children, making life very difficult for those who were trying to bring them up.

Somebody would do Direct Pay and pay up, do their own arrangement and everything would be working well; then, when they thought that the Child Maintenance Service was off their back, what would they do? They would stop paying. The enforcement teams would write saying that they had not paid. They would give a raft of pathetic excuses. The enforcement team would then get involved, it would take for ever and there were these vast outstanding sums that should have gone to children. You would go back to Collect and Pay. There would be sums involved that would need to be taken from the amount of money.

I cannot tell your Lordships the lengths to which people will go not to pay their child maintenance. It is shameful and disgraceful. The sooner that these commencement orders are enacted, the quicker we can get money to children and the better their quality of life. I support the amendments in my noble friend’s name. It was quite something to have the two of us on the case of people who did not pay their child maintenance. I would love to be back there doing that now. I hope that the Minister will pull something out of the hat for this.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I too support the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, on this. She was asked whether this affects the child’s well-being, since the money does not go to them. Of course it affects their well-being.

I can tell your Lordships of a family that I know. I know that hard cases make bad law, but theirs is pretty typical. The husband disappeared. There were four children at home. Those children have survived only because of the determination and hard work of the mother. If she was not the strong character that she is, those children’s well-being would be a lot worse than it is now. There is no question that it affects the children’s well-being. I quite agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, that it is a disgrace. If anything can be done to improve the situation, whether it is the noble Baroness’s amendment or something else, I will be right behind it.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friends Lady Coffey and Lady Stedman-Scott, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, have made an incredibly strong case for the importance of this amendment. As my noble friend Lady Coffey said, the Lords Public Services Committee has a live inquiry into this very important topic.

The statistics are stark, as we heard, with over a million children covered by child maintenance agreements but enforcement still not being effective enough and too many parents making no payments at all, paying irregularly or paying insufficient amounts. When I was running the domestic abuse charity SafeLives, non-payment of child maintenance was incredibly frequent and caused huge problems in the lives of children and their mothers. As other noble Lords have said, at its simplest, non-payment exacerbates either the risk of poverty or the actual poverty that so many single-parent families face. In cases of domestic abuse, non-payment was often used as a means of coercion and control over a mother and her child, raising the risk of harm to them both. The anxiety that this creates, and the pressure that this puts on a mother, directly impact the well-being of her child.

We also saw the longer-term impact, in physical and mental health problems for the child. The Institute for Public Policy Research has found that child maintenance currently lifts around 140,000 children out of poverty across the UK. Conversely, when payments are not made, the impact is devastating. Finally, we know that child maintenance is not just a private matter between separated parents but a fundamental determinant of a child’s well-being and future life chances. When maintenance payments fail, society bears the cost through increased demand on public services, educational support and healthcare interventions.

As my noble friend so simply and clearly put it, there are two pieces of legislation on the statute books that need to be commenced. I hope very much that the Minister will confirm that the Government plan to do that and that we can make progress on unlocking the £700 million that belongs to our children.

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Moved by

[Baroness Walmsley]

189: After Clause 28, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of free school meal eligibility and pupil premium registration(1) The Secretary of State must, within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, conduct a review of—(a) the number of children in England who are eligible for free school meals but are not claiming them,(b) the number of children who are eligible for free school meals but are not registered for the purposes of pupil premium funding,(c) the number of additional children who would be eligible for free school meals if the income thresholds had been uprated in line with inflation since 2018, and(d) the number of additional children who would be eligible for free school meals if the income thresholds were set at £20,000 per annum after tax.(2) A review under subsection (1) must include an assessment of—(a) barriers preventing eligible children from claiming free school meals,(b) disparities in take-up rates across different regions and demographics, and(c) the financial and educational impact of under-registration on schools and local authorities.(3) The Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament setting out the findings of the review, including any recommendations for improving registration for and take-up of free school meals and pupil premium funding.(4) The review and report required under this section must be repeated annually.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires a review of free school meal eligibility and pupil premium registration.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 193 in this group is also in my name. I say again how pleased I am that the Labour Government have broadened the eligibility for free school meals. However, much still needs to be done, particularly on the quality of the meals and the enforcement of the standards, which needed reviewing anyway—that was the subject of Amendment 190, debated last week—and to ensure that all eligible children get their meal. In recent years the whole issue of school meals has been left to flounder, despite their importance to children’s health, and I am pleased that the Government are now picking it up again.

Amendment 189 calls for an annual review, with the results to be laid before Parliament, of the barriers to all eligible children receiving their free school meal, and clarification of how many eligible children are missing out. The review must assess how many children are eligible, under whatever the current threshold is, and how many would be eligible if the threshold had been uprated since 2018. It must also assess how many would be eligible if the threshold were to be set at £20,000 per year after tax. Because of the inequalities that we know about, the review would have to cover regional and demographic disparities in take-up rates and the financial and educational impact on schools and local authorities, bearing in mind that a child on free school meals currently brings the pupil premium with him or her to the school for education purposes. That set of reviews would give us more information about how the system was working and would form a very useful underpinning for the development of policy in future.

Amendment 193 would ensure the auto-enrolment of all children eligible for free school meals and expand eligibility even further than the recent change to households whose income is less than £20,000 per year after tax. That would be yet another step in the right direction. I know that the Secretary of State, in making the recent announcement that all children in families on universal credit will be eligible for free school meals next year, claimed that this simpler system will make it easier for families to register. However, it is still not the same as auto-enrolment, and schools as well as families are losing out because they are losing the pupil premium that comes with FSM.

The evidence to the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee was clear that there are many children who would become eligible, under whatever threshold, who may not get their free school meal, such as it is, and that there are many children in poverty whose parents struggle to pay for a hot meal for their children. These parents or families, eligible but not registered for FSM, often send the child to school with a packed lunch of dubious nutritional value—we were given several examples—not because they do not care about their children’s health but because they cannot afford the price of a decent packed lunch or a hot meal. It is these unregistered families, and those just above the eligibility threshold, who suffer the most from regulations.

Free school meals, and breakfasts, are one of the most important levers that the Government have to ensure that, however poor the parents, however lacking their cooking facilities at home, whatever kind of food desert the family live in, the children can get two healthy meals every school day—if they also get a free breakfast—to ensure that they grow up strong and a healthy weight, with no rotting teeth and no wrong food preferences to take through life and make them susceptible to obesity. I hope the Government will agree with these amendments, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, Amendments 191 and 192 are in my name and are closely related to that already introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for offering her support to my amendments.

Amendment 191 is essentially a different way of getting to the same intention as Amendment 193. We are aiming to get auto-enrolment so that every child who is eligible for free school meals gets them, and surely that is something that the Government want to do. I have no particular opinion on whether Amendment 191 or Amendment 193 is the best way to do it; we can debate that after this point, although I would love to hear the Government say, “We want to do this and we’re going to do it, so you don’t have to worry about this on Report”.

The best stats on the previous form of free school meals, before the Government’s recent extension, showed that up to 250,000 children, or about 11% of those eligible for free school meals, missed out because it is an opt-in process. That is a point that my honourable friend Ellie Chowns in the other place has already highlighted, so I will not go through it in great detail. However, I will note that the Fix Our Food research programme showed that it is children from non-majority communities and lone-parent households who are more likely not to be registered for free school meals despite being eligible. Inequalities here multiply themselves time and again.

Reasons the charity give for this include parents struggling to fill out the complex forms, language barriers or that there may be a simple lack of awareness. There may also be stigma around free school meals. I hope the Committee will join me in saying there is no reason why there should be, but the practical reality is that we know there is. I also note that the Greater London Authority has put resources into auto-enrolment, showing that it is possible to make a difference, but around the rest of the country that is not available.

I come back to my point about stigma, because Amendment 192 would extend free school lunches to all primary schoolchildren in state-funded schools. I will quote a question that was put to me by a year 7 pupil from Lordswood Boys’ School in Birmingham this morning—and, no, I did not put him up to it; it was not prompted in any way. Some other questions identified me as a representative of the Government and I had to correct that misapprehension, but he simply said to me: “Why don’t we get free school meals?” That is something that shows a really high level of awareness. People feel the inequality and suffering that has come from the lack of those free school meals.

Amendment 192, which the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has kindly backed, would not actually help that year 7 boy. This is me and the Green Party going for the moderate, middle-of-the-road option, because Green Party policy is free school meals for all school pupils, which would help that pupil in Birmingham. What we have here is simply an amendment for all primary school pupils, and part of the reason for that is the example from London of how positive it has been.

I note that an evaluation of this has been conducted already to see what has happened. There has been a lived-experience evaluation by the Child Poverty Action Group and an implementation evaluation as well. This policy, unsurprisingly, was really popular and had a very high level of take up—between 88% and 90% across three school terms. Among the positive outcomes, 84% of parents said it had improved the family budget. One-third of parents said that the policy meant they had less debt. Three in five parents said they were able to spend more money on food at home as a result. We talk so often in your Lordships’ House about our broken food system and how it is so difficult to get a healthy diet.

There are more positives. More than half of parents thought their child was trying new foods as a result of being exposed to them at school. This is the kind of thing we might not think about, but more than half of parents said that it saved them time in the morning that they had been forced to use making packed lunches. We all know that can make a real difference to families. More than one-third of parents thought their children were concentrating better in lessons as a result.

This is a moderate challenge to the Government to look at what has been achieved in London. We know the levels of inequality between London and the rest of the county. Let us break down that inequality and make it better, at least for our primary school pupils.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My point was that linking free school meal entitlement to universal credit will make it much easier both for families to apply and for us to monitor the levels. However, I will respond to the noble Lord on his specific point.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply and all noble Lords who have spoken in favour of this important group of amendments. I assure the Minister that, as I have said today and last week, I very much welcome the expansion of eligibility for free school meals.

On Amendment 189, it is important that when the Government come, as the Minister has promised they will, to monitor the uptake under the new eligibility rules, there is enough detail in there. My amendment mentions demographics, regional differences and cultural differences and so on. All that would give a good and useful set of information to help the Government to develop policy even further.

I am not going to go on any further about free school meals—I could go on all night. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, resisted it and so will I. I beg to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 189 withdrawn.