Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the introduction of a central contract for the Nursery Milk Scheme on the viability of the supply of school milk to over-fives.

The Nursery Milk Scheme supplies nursery milk to over 48,000 settings annually including local authority and private nurseries and independent child-minders. A small minority of these settings also receive deliveries of school milk.

Proposals for modernising the nursery Milk Scheme were consulted upon by the Department of Health in 2012 and the Government response, published in March this year, set out plans for procurement of a direct supply Nursery Milk Scheme.

Plans for implementing the modernised Nursery Milk Scheme have been put together, discussed, and assessed between Government officials via a cross Government Nursery Milk Scheme Task and Finish Group which includes representatives from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who are responsible for the School Milk Scheme .

The Department has also held six separate supplier days as part of putting together the invitation to tender documents for the modernised Nursery Milk Scheme. These presented an opportunity for officials to discuss proposals for the Scheme with companies from the dairy and milk delivery sectors. These discussions included open forum question and answer sessions between company representatives and officials from the Department of Health and, also, one to one sessions between individual companies and Departmental officials. Some of these discussions included references to milk deliveries for the over 5s School milk scheme.

The specific issue of School milk deliveries to the over 5s was also mentioned in discussions between Departmental officials and a group of key market representatives invited to a meeting organised by Dairy UK in April 2014.