Free food for kids

The most eye-catching announcement from the Liberal Democrat Conference in Glasgow was the introduction of free school meals for every child in Reception, Year 1 & Year 2 next September. This policy is emblematic of the profound mood shift in Liberal Democrats generally. The novelty of being in government has subsided and the ability to change the country is now unremarkable to Liberal Democrat supporters. The primary goal of the coalition was to repair the economy and cut back the massive borrowing inherited from the Labour Party. There is a satisfaction that the tough discipline needed to get the economy back on track is starting to show fruit in a growing mood of optimism.

The school meal change is one only the Liberal Democrats could have produced. The word “free” would have made this measure unpalatable to Tories. Their underlying harsh laissez-faire attitude creates an economy where many working families are so pressurised that they never break into that comfortable balanced lifestyle that gives opportunities to flourish. The word “every” is what would upset the Labour Party. Their approach is to lavish borrowed cash on the “poorest” with a tangled web of means-testing, support and subsidy. The perverse effect is to create a welfare trap, where families trying to break from total state dependency into the world of work find their support collapsing away and immersed in a bureaucratic nightmare. Of course Labour calculates that trapped welfare dependants look to them to sustain their subsistence lifestyles with state funding for a lifetime.

With this new universal benefit, getting more work won’t cause you to lose your kids school meals along with every other support. Taken with the Liberal Democrat headline policy of taking the first £10,000 of everyone’s income out of income tax (remember the Tories said it couldn't be done before the election) means that people have a better chance than before of working their way to greater independence and opportunity.

Free school meals will reduce stigma in school and the segregation of the cooked & packed lunchers. It will ensure every child gets at least one balanced meal every school day. It also takes pressure off the morning routine for parents making sandwiches as well as providing lots of new jobs in schools as meal-time assistants. These term-time school hours jobs are great for mums and dads who have childcare responsibilities.

Those Lib Dem voters who objected to coalition are now long gone and those who stridently predicted the collapse of the coalition and the Lib Dems have been decisively proved wrong. The party is now attracting supporters who see the party as delivering progressive change in government and who are highly likely to be back in government in 2015 with a coalition partner to be decided by the British people. A confident, united forward-looking Liberal Democrat conference has confounded yet again the conventional political wisdom by its very existence and optimism.

Cllr Adrian Fullam
Leader
Exeter Liberal Democrats