Sharon Hodgson MP: Hundreds of thousands more children to be fed with Labour extension to Free School Meals

This is a significant step for safeguarding our children and stopping child hunger.

I have advocated and pushed for over 18 years to universalise free school meals to all children. As a recipient of free school meals for all my educational life, I know first-hand the importance of a reliable and guaranteed healthy school meal. This is why I have put so much time and effort into chairing the School Food APPG – since I set it up in 2010 – and campaigning for Free School Meals.

Under the current criteria for Free School Meals, children can only qualify if their annual household income is less than £7,400. It is a mistake to believe that families earning say £8,000 a year are not struggling financially, and this £7,400 limit left many children vulnerable and hungry.

With the ongoing cost of living crisis, this will support feeding children nutritious meals and helping families to use money on other essential areas. This new policy will save parents £500 a year and lift 100,000 children out of poverty.

From September 2026, 500,000 children will feel the benefits. In my constituency, up to a further 5,460 children will now have access to Free School Meals. The Prime Minster said, this scheme will “help the families that need it the most”. I back this scheme as it supports vulnerable families from low socio-economic backgrounds and further fights child food poverty.

This is only the beginning; the associate director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says the expansion of Free School Meals would result in 1.7 million children getting free school lunches in the long term.

Free School Meals ensure that children are better equipped to learn and play. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson states that “if you’re hungry, it’s really hard to concentrate”.

With a full belly children can focus better on learning, and they can engage better in physical activities whether that be P.E. or activities at lunch time.

Other areas of the United Kingdom have already been leading the way before this announcement. In London and Wales, for example, all primary school children have had access to free school meals. In Scotland, all children in the first five years of primary school are offered free school meals as well as those receiving the Scottish Child Payment benefit. Since 2024, families in Northern Ireland in receipt of Universal Credit and those on less than £15,000 annually have access to free school meals. This is double that of England’s original cut-off income of £7,400.

I am therefore glad that England has begun to follow UK-wide examples and adopt this national vision of wide-spread access to free school meals.

This is an important step, which I greatly welcome, to better protect the most vulnerable children and families in our society, but there is still more to be done.

This Free School Meal extension will not fix the lack of an automatic enrolment system that would remove access barriers. The onus is currently on us to encourage each individual local authority to do that.

This Labour government promised to be a driver for social mobility and policies like this go in the right direction, the £1billion promised to fund this change signals our dedication to supporting working families – and that must be celebrated.