Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he plans to launch a Holiday Activities and Food Programme for 2020.

In January 2018, we announced a programme to ensure that disadvantaged young people could access healthy food and enriching activities during the school holidays. We awarded £2 million to 7 organisations, working in some of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, for the 2018 summer holidays.

We more than quadrupled this funding to £9 million for 2019. During the summer holidays, in 11 areas across the country, we will explore how the local coordination of the provision nutritious food and enriching and healthy activities can help more disadvantaged pupils to access free high quality holiday club provision during the school holidays.

The purpose of this programme is to allow us to gather more evidence about the scale of the issue, the most effective ways of tackling it and the costs and burdens associated with doing so. As a result, we will be able to make an evidence-based decision about whether and how we should intervene in the longer term.