School Meal Vouchers

Gandhi is credited with the aphorism; “A civilization is measured by how well it treats its weakest members.” This is pertinent today with the furore over free school meals for the most deprived. No child should go hungry – it’s abuse, pure and simple. 

The threshold for free school meals, essentially, is a household income of £16,190, which is a very small amount on which to raise a family and pay for all the essentials. I certainly wouldn’t like to have to live on that amount. 

That said, there are stories in the red top press of parents spending school meal vouchers on mom-essentials, such as beer. Now if someone on under £16,190 a year can afford to buy beer with school meal vouchers, that suggests to me that either the kids need taking into care, or the parent is self-employed and fiddling his or her taxes through the black economy. Given that tax fiddling among the self-employed is endemic (the ‘how much for cash’ syndrome, in which the giver and receiver collude), I would suggest the latter to be more likely. 

I saw a Facebook post from a woman in receipt of free school meals bemoaning that she’s about to go on maternity leave, which will leave her in dire straits. I empathise, but I would nevertheless question the wisdom of having more children when she obviously can’t afford to feed them herself without state support. It’s akin to buying a house you know you can’t afford. 

Overpopulation is a problem and probably the major cause of most of the ills that we suffer from in our present milieu; global warming, hunger and poverty. That said, the reasons for having children are complex and not always based on rational decisions – the desire to have a family is a powerful, innate driver or instinct in most people. I certainly would not like to be the politician that says having children will be means tested, but without a socialist model, it's hard, from a purely objective, stance to see how else world hunger and world poverty can possibly be eliminated.

Those who scam the system or are led to believe the state is there to support them, whatever misjudged life decisions they make, are the exception and not the rule. It could be argued they are actually capitalists, using loopholes in the system in the same manner as the super-rich who squirrel away their capital in offshore accounts to avoid tax. Both are robbing the state. 

Perhaps the system needs to change such that state aid reaches those who actually need it and not the scammers, but the cost of policing such a system would probably outweigh the savings, as they do in many areas of life. It’s a cost we must accept as a civilised society and we can’t penalise the majority for the actions of a few. Benefit fraud is far outweighed by tax evasion; According to HMRC it’s to the tune of a factor of between 10 and 15, although that’s only an estimate and all estimates are fraught with problems of measurement. 

It’s a fact that a lot of people’s circumstances have changed since the start of 2020 through no fault of their own – jobs have been lost and people who were employed but made redundant and went into self-employment have no access to Covid state aid in the event of a 2nd lockdown. 

In the final analysis, does the fact that a few abuse the system justify thousands of kids going hungry by not facilitating school meal vouchers at this time? Are kids to be allowed to suffer for the actions of their parents? Not in my estimation, and surely not in the mind of any right thinking person.

As an aside, I was told yesterday that a restaurant in South Glos was fiddling the Eat Out to Help Out scheme by allocating cash payments made on days of the week not under the scheme to days the scheme was operating, writing out false receipts, and also claiming the full amount was the discounted amount. I wonder how many others were operating this scam.