Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps the Government is taking to support local authorities and third sector organisations in helping to prevent holiday hunger during school holidays.

Last year I announced a programme of work to explore how best to support disadvantaged children to access healthy food and enriching activities during the school holidays. This included £2 million awarded to 7 third sector organisations to deliver this sort of provision, free, to disadvantaged pupils over the 2018 summer holidays.

We are more than quadrupling that amount for the 2019 summer holidays where we will be exploring how the coordination of this sort of provision across a local authority can help more disadvantaged pupils to access free high quality holiday club provision. Funding will support providers to deliver free high quality holiday provision (including healthy food) to disadvantaged children and young people in a number of local authorities.

We have received applications for a share of this £9 million from a range of organisations including local authorities and third sector organisations, and will be announcing the successful bidders and the geographical locations for the scheme later in the spring.

This programme of work will enable the government to make an evidence-based decision about if, and how, to intervene in this issue in the longer term.