What lessons do Sadiq Khan's free school meals have for Labour as two-child benefit cap ends?

Sadiq Khan dons a bright orange apron to serve up lunch to the children of Shoreditch Park Primary. After the gaggle of purple-jumpered pupils line up to take their pick of rice and peas, coleslaw, salad, plantain and more, the mayor of London sits down to eat with them. 

A long while ago, Khan was the one receiving free school meals – lining up in a separate queue to other children to be fed each day.

But in the here and now he is at the east London primary school to celebrate a policy milestone as mayor. After introducing universal free school meals for all of London’s primary pupils in 2023, more than 100 million dishes have been provided.

“As somebody who was on means-tested school benefits, the idea of labelling kids poor or deprived obviously affects you for a long, long time. I want all kids to get on with each other, to break bread together, to have friends of different socioeconomic backgrounds,” Khan tells Big Issue in one of the school’s classrooms.

“I don’t want to separate kids based upon their parents’ needs or where they live.”

Yet discontent over feeding children has bubbled up anew.

A Department for Education video released as part of the national government’s expansion of free school breakfast clubs was met with backlash after it showed parents saying they would use an extra 30 minutes in their days to go to a coffee shop, or have a five minute nap. 

The backlash was not just from the right – Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani, who has written a book on Fully Automated Luxury Communism, said it made a “family friendly policy look like a Costa coffee subsidy”.

After Khan’s announcement of 100 million free school meals, TalkTV host Julia Hartley-Brewer spelled out: “They. Are. Not Free. They are funded by TAXPAYERS.”

So might the London mayor’s school dinners policy have lessons for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? The day after Khan visited the school, the chancellor announced an end to the two-child limit on benefits. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch branded it a “budget for Benefits Street”.

Opponents point to the £3 billion annual cost, and the sacrifices some have made in not having children. 

It is, technically, an unpopular policy. YouGov polling has suggested 57% of people supported keeping the cap in place.

But its advocates say it will lift 350,000 children out of poverty immediately. And that is very popular.

Read more:

• What does the end to the two-child limit on benefits mean for you?
• Child hunger is a ‘damning indictment’ of Britain, says Olympic champion Christine Ohuruogu
• Mayor of London Sadiq Khan recalls receiving free school meals as a child: ‘I was lucky’

“Who do you support?” is Khan’s go-to conversation opener as he eats with the pupils. The Liverpool FC fan is confronted with a table of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur supporters. “You don’t have to remind me we have lost five games in a row but I am grateful, thank you Tottenham fans,” he tells them.

Afterwards, he frames the policy as a win for universalism.

“When you’re an inpatient, nobody checks what your means are when it comes to your breakfast, your lunch or your dinner. You’re a captive audience, same with kids going to school,” he says.

The mayor’s team say the policy saves families £500 a year. That’s all parents sending kids to the capital’s primary schools, and the city has no shortage of rich parents. Khan says well-off parents are more than welcome to contribute to schools in other ways, such as joining the Parent-Teacher Association.

“When it comes to lunchtime, some kids aren’t having a great meal. Some kids’ lunchboxes haven’t been a good quality of nutritional value. It impacts their ability to learn, impacts behaviour of all kids in classrooms. So it’s a good example of the whole classroom benefiting, the whole school benefiting, and society benefiting because of universalism.”

Penny Smith, the headteacher of Shoreditch Park, says the impact of universal free school meals has been profound. Previously, there was a “significant layer” of families struggling with the cost of living but not entitled to the free meals.

“We would never stop a child having a lunch, so what that meant is we had a huge amount of debt building up in terms of parents not being able to pay. It’s definitely removed a burden for many families,” Smith says.

But Smith says funding has not kept up with increasing food prices that outstrip headline rates of inflation. “I don’t think it’s kept pace with it, but I don’t know how it could,” says Smith. Cost pressures have led them to change providers, and to introduce meat-free Mondays.

“The worst thing you can do to any family is take it away. It’s almost harder than not having had it in the first place,” Smith says. “I think it has become something that families are now relying on and factoring into their household bills. That would be my biggest fear, is it stopping now.”

What is happening in London could show Starmer how to make the public case for the not-uncontroversial move of scrapping the two-child benefit limit. “I would hope it does give them confidence to make the moral case for it,” says professor Ashwin Kumar, head of the research and policy teams and the IPPR think tank, which describes itself as “the ideas factory behind many of the current government’s flagship policies”.

Faced with a tension between the popularity of ending child poverty and a lack of support for individual policies which might achieve that, a clear narrative and moral mission can help politicians get to the end-goal, says Kumar. “The public don’t have to resolve those tensions between the different things that one might think. But that moral purpose to tackle child poverty is a really important one,” he said. 

“I think the public will appreciate that on the part of the government.”

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