Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he has taken to ensure that children and young people have been receiving healthy and nutritious meals during the 2020 school summer holidays.

We knew that some families would face increased pressure on household budgets over the summer due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We therefore established the COVID-19 Summer Food Fund to provide supermarket vouchers for children who receive benefits-related free school meals.

Families were free to select the most appropriate food and drink for their child. When selecting products, we encouraged families to consider health and nutrition and signposted that the School Food Standards act as a useful guide. There were a number of online resources available to support families in preparing healthy and nutritious food, including on the NHS Eat Well website and recipes produced by the Change4Life campaign.

In addition, our £9 million Holiday Activities and Food Programme worked across 17 local authority areas, providing thousands of children with access to healthy meals and enriching activities. Family Action and Magic Breakfast also continued to offer healthy meals through our National School Breakfast Programme during the summer holidays in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

These schemes were part of a wider package of government support, which included a £63 million fund for local authorities to help those struggling financially due to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This allowed local authorities to provide financial help to those facing severe hardship to allow them to pay for food and other necessities.