Petition Enabled Payment for School Dinners via Child Care Vouchers

For a family with three children, school dinners cost in the region of £1,300 per year.

With family costs rising rapidly and well ahead of wages, this is becoming increasingly unaffordable for many (if not most) parents, and will become still less tenable in Apr-12, when Child Benefit is withdrawn for many.

If the existing Child Care Vouchers scheme could be extended to cover School Dinners, this would reduce the cost to parents by about a third (mostly).

This measure would serve both ease family costs, increase take-up rate (bringing the benefits of a nutritionally balanced lunch to more children) and prevent a decline in numbers materially impacting the economics of delivering school dinners.

Hence, we hereby petition the Government to make it possible to pay for School Dinners via the Child Care Vouchers scheme.