More than 10,000 children risk going hungry this summer, and Wandsworth Council votes tomorrow to make it permanent.
Wandsworth will save around £2.5m a year. The vouchers currently give £20 a week to more than 10,000 children across the borough during the school holidays, a scheme that cost £2,782,000 last year. Under the new plan, that falls to £277,000.
Cabinet member for finance Cllr Peter Graham has already been called to task on the decision by opposition councillor Judi Gasser. She told him at a Full Council meeting on 22 July: “On the eleventh of June, our most vulnerable families got an email telling them there would be no more holiday food vouchers. That’s the first they’ve heard of it. You threw them off a cliff.”
But there’s a twist. In fact, not one, not two, but three.
Graham told the chamber the cut wasn’t his choice. “It is the Labour government that has created a rule that you cannot use the Crisis and Resilience Fund to fund free school meal vouchers during holidays,” he said.
That’s twist one. Twist two is that it isn’t true. At least not any more. The government guidance he was quoting did in fact ban councils from using vouchers back in March. But then it changed it mind. In April.
Gasser read him the actual (revised) wording: “If you look at the guidance, paragraph 44 says the support may or may not be through the blanket provision of vouchers,” she said. “You could have done that.”
Cllr Graham responded by denying it. “It is her own government, the Labour government, that has prevented councils from using the crisis and resilience fund to fund those vouchers,” he told her, “and she needs to have a word with her own members of Parliament.”
Twist three: Graham clearly thought he was right but there is no real excuse for getting it wrong. Even though the guidance originally denied the councils the right to use vouchers, its reversal happened on 1 April, three and a half months before he made the claim – and it wasn’t an April Fool – so either Cllr Graham has been misinformed by council staff, which is very possible given the timescale, or he choose not to notice. Either way, it is a sudden food cut-off for some of the youngest and poorest in our borough.
Not the only council caught out
Several other councils’ own paperwork shows the same outdated wording circulating well into the spring. Wandsworth’s Cabinet paper still repeated it this week in the papers that will be decided on tomorrow.
Papers filed by York, Wolverhampton, Enfield, Brent and Camden Councils between 16 January and 25 March this year – all five of them Labour-run at the time – carried an earlier version of paragraph 44. It read: “This may not be through the blanket provision of vouchers”, with no “or”. A ban, not a choice.
The Department for Work and Pensions changed that wording to “may or may not” on 1 April, the day the three-year funding period it governs actually began. The change does not appear to have been announced. The department’s own visible update log names a later, 7 April revision, and says that one touched a different paragraph, on crisis payment timing, entirely.
Wandsworth’s Cabinet paper repeats Graham’s version in writing. “The explicit guidance,” it says, means the funding “should not be used for blanket schemes such as Holiday Food Vouchers.” Members vote on that, seemingly false, basis tomorrow.
There is a genuine financial crisis
The council does have a genuine money problem behind the decision. Funding the vouchers in full would have used 73.7 per cent of its entire £3.77m Crisis and Resilience Fund grant for the year, leaving £109,613 for everything else the fund must also cover. £423,000 of last year’s voucher cost was already coming out of the council’s own budget, not central government’s.
The same Cabinet paper puts a separate £6.2m, left over from the council’s Cost of Living Reserve, back into general reserves – where it will be sorely needed to fill what the Conservatives have said is a £137m hole left from the previous administration.
Gasser was not finished. “You have left our families in dire straits,” she told Graham. “Imagine not being able to feed your children. Can you promise me and the residents of Wandsworth that no child is going to go hungry on your watch?”
The council’s own Cabinet paper ends:
“The ongoing impact of the cost of living continues to place significant pressure on low-income households in Wandsworth, with residents facing sustained challenges around food, energy, housing and wider household costs.”
Cabinet meets tomorrow, Wednesday, at 7.30pm in Room 123 at the Town Hall. The meeting is open to the public.
