Peer remembers ‘mounting panic’ of holidays without free school meals that Etonians ‘won’t experience’

Moving speech in support of Marcus Rashford’s campaign

A peer has told of the “mounting panic” his family experienced when holidays approached – as pressure grows on Boris Johnson to offer free school meals during half-term and other breaks.  

The prime minister continues to resist calls to back England footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign.  

But his own food tsar Henry Dimbleby, the co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, has warned that the government “isn’t doing enough” to address child hunger and called for urgent action.

Labour’s Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, a former Methodist minister, told the House of Lords that even in his seventies he remembers “very clearly” the panic school holidays caused when he was a boy.  

He told peers that he was in receipt of free meals when he was at school.  

“My mother, a single woman, her only income was the contributions of the National Assistance,” he said. “We lived in one room.

“I remember very clearly, I can still taste and smell it, the mounting panic ahead of school holidays because the income we had could not stretch to feeding two boys and a mother in that day.”

He joked that he has this experience in common with Premier League footballer Mr Rashford and “probably only this”. 

“We remember not in our heads but in our whole bodies,” he said.  

In a remark that will be interpreted as a comment on Mr Johnson, he added: “An old Etonian, of course, can’t be expected to have had the same experience.”

Hundreds of local businesses and councils have said they will provide poor children with free school meals this half-term if ministers will not.  

But Lord Griffiths warned that children faced a “postcode lottery” because different councils and communities would act in different ways.  

Education minister Baroness Berridge, replying in the Lords, said: “Many noble lords of all parties and none can recall circumstances in which their own needs – whether that be housing or food – were not met through the circumstances of their family.

“It’s not a postcode lottery – 1.4 million children in England are entitled to free school meals, saving their families over £400 a year, and in addition to that, particularly through the soft drinks levy, the government has in nearly 2,500 schools been funding breakfast clubs to provide children with healthy food.”