Good morning. I welcome the press, the public and witnesses to the 25th meeting in 2006 of the Finance Committee. As usual, I remind people to turn off their pagers and mobile phones. We have received no apologies, but Mark Ballard will be a little late.
COSLA supports the principles of the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Bill, which should lead to a net improvement in youngsters' diet. New nutritional standards will enable us to determine whether children are eating properly and having healthy snacks and drinks. The Executive will publish the new standards but we will not, until we have been able to examine them, be in a position to say much about how they might affect budgets, for example. However, the bill is good and follows our successful and on-going campaign, which followed the report, "Hungry for Success: A Whole School Approach to School Meals in Scotland".
Frank McAveety and Elaine Murray will take the lead on the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Bill.
I welcome the witnesses. I hope that our question and answer session will generate a reasonable amount of information and discussion.
Provision is fairly patchy. I have no idea how many local authorities in Scotland provide breakfasts, but a fair number of authorities in the central belt do. In my authority, we budget for £1 as the average cost of a breakfast in the schools that serve breakfasts, but we discovered recently that the price will go up towards the beginning of next year. We must look to our laurels and consider how to continue the scheme without reducing the numbers too much.
It is fair to say that Glasgow City Council operates the biggest free breakfast scheme in Scotland, if not in Britain. All 173 primary schools in the area operate a free breakfast service, as opposed to a breakfast club. The council spends £2.4 million per year on breakfast provision and, across the area, uptake is 20 per cent, which is quite a good level, if we bear it in mind that probably everyone would prefer their children to eat breakfast at home. At least 7,500 children who might not otherwise have a breakfast eat breakfast at school, so we are providing about 1.3 million breakfasts every year. I hope that those figures help members as they gather their thoughts.
Some current guesstimates suggest that the cost would be between £70 million and £90 million. Would that be an additional cost to local authorities, on top of what they are already providing? How do you determine that?
Glasgow City Council represents roughly 10 per cent of Scotland and the scheme costs Glasgow £2.4 million, so £70 million seems to be somewhat excessive, although it depends on specifications. There is no great requirement to provide capital expenditure for additional equipment, but you need to consider the cost of supervision during the breakfast service. Supervision is included in the Glasgow costs, but that may differ in other authorities.
We are looking today and next week at both bills: the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Bill from the Executive and Frances Curran's Education (School Meals etc) (Scotland) Bill. We will be asking Frances about her bill next week, but I am not quite clear whether her bill will require authorities to provide both meals—lunch and breakfast—free. The financial memorandum to her bill says that the cost of free meals in primary schools will be between £66.3 million and £72.8 million, but I think that that is for lunches, based on a fairly reasonable estimate of uptake. What do the witnesses think the financial impact would be if they were required, under such a bill, to provide all meals to primary pupils free of charge?
I will have to ask Fergus Chambers to help me to answer that question, because I am not at all sure. COSLA is, in principle, against the Education (School Meals etc) (Scotland) Bill, for fairly obvious cost reasons. Our argument is that, if we can look at the eligibility criteria for free school meals and improve those criteria—I am confident that we can—the youngsters who most need the meal would get the meal, whereas the Education (School Meals etc) (Scotland) Bill would provide meals for a majority of children whose parents could well afford to pay for them.
What sort of uptake do you expect? Do you agree with the sort of uptake that Frances Curran suggests?
It is extremely difficult to cost universal free school meals and to forecast uptake. Universal free school meals will work only if they are popular: that will depend on the specification and on how each local authority intends to deliver them. My local authority—if I may put my cards on the table—has yet to consider that at the political level, so I cannot give a view on whether the council believes it to be a good thing or not. From a practical perspective, I put down a marker by saying that there is no point in giving away free something that nobody wants: the service must be popular and there must be investment to support it. Until the detailed specification is known, I could not possibly cost it.
I presume that it would be difficult to estimate the impact of having to provide free breakfasts and lunches.
It is easy to estimate the cost of free breakfasts in Glasgow, because we already provide them. That is a known quantity. The provision of universal free school meals is an unknown quantity, and I suspect that the level of uptake or popularity would vary across the country, which is why costing of such a measure is difficult.
To whom is the breakfast service that you currently provide available? Is it a universal provision or are there eligibility criteria?
There are absolutely no eligibility criteria. Any child in Glasgow can have the service free, and 20 per cent of children currently take advantage of that service. The level of uptake has been consistent since the start of the service.
When was that?
A pilot scheme was started two years ago. Since then we have rolled out the scheme so that it is available in every school.
Did you say that the total cost was £2.4 million?
That is right.
Have you done any studies of which pupils, or which categories of pupils, based on their backgrounds, are taking up that provision? Under what circumstances are people more likely or less likely to take it up?
I do not think that I can answer that in a way that would give you the information that you seek. We have done some analytical studies, which indicate the level of uptake relative to the level of deprivation. To be honest, there is no consistent statistic that has come out and that we can use—there are different levels of uptake in different parts of the city. There is no consistent message other than the overall point that, in areas of greater deprivation, there is slightly higher uptake. It is no more than that, however.
We started the breakfast clubs in areas of deprivation and gradually spread them elsewhere in the Glasgow City Council area. They are extremely popular. The disquieting thing that faces us, however, is the possibility of providing all school meals free, which would mean a huge investment in capital changes for schools, which would have to find the room to provide meals for every single child.
I wish to return to the breakfast issue. I know that it is still early days and that the pilot process is still continuing, but there are two or three types of analysis that it would be quite useful for us to hear about. One would be an analysis of the uptake by schools. It is, I presume, possible to link the catchment areas of schools to deprivation. Secondly, it might be possible to determine whether free school meals are more or less likely to be taken up in a given school by children who have existing entitlement to free school meals. Within a school, which types of pupils are more likely to take up the provision? Is there an issue with that? Thirdly, are there factors around the quality of service that could influence take-up? In other words, is there a pattern of better breakfasts or different arrangements at some schools attracting greater take-up there? Is there evidence that you can give us on those factors?
I can certainly make available to the clerks information on the uptake per school. We do not record who takes up free meals, because we have no need to. I cannot give you statistical evidence on whether the higher level of uptake is among children who already qualify for free school meals.
Our practice is almost exactly the same as the one that Fergus Chambers has just explained. In pursuing good-quality meals, every so often—probably quarterly—we put out a questionnaire to schools, asking them to comment and to answer certain questions about the quality, variety and warmth of the food. That is one way in which we ensure that the meals are of a high standard.
Frances Curran has a supplementary question about breakfasts.
My question is related to what Councillor Gray said about capital costs. I have three questions, but they will be brief.
I am afraid that I cannot hear you very well.
I am sorry. I have three questions, and I will be brief, although I do not know whether the answers can be brief. The first is on your point about the breakfast clubs and how you project take-up to allocate appropriate funding.
We are still pretty hesitant on targets. The finance for hungry for success will end reasonably soon and we hope that it will be continued, directly or indirectly, for schools. Otherwise, the programme might fail. COSLA thinks that for the continuity of hungry for success and for it to succeed, the programme or the Education (School Meals etc) (Scotland) Bill should generate a direct injection of the required cash.
We did not know what uptake to expect in the breakfast service that was developed in Glasgow, because it was new to us. We budgeted for 30 per cent uptake, but in the first year of trading, uptake was consistently between 20 per cent and 21 per cent.
What lesson do you draw from that experience? How do you intend to deal with it?
The lesson that I draw is that we need to be extremely careful in developing the right balance between the health agenda and reality, if I can call it that. Nobody around the table would argue against improving health, diet and nutrition and reducing obesity. However, if we do that in a way that means that nobody wants to use the service, that defeats its purpose.
Teenagers who could access free meals are not taking them, but are instead spending their own money outside school.
In secondary schools, our free meals uptake was 67 per cent in the last financial year. We project a rate of 52 per cent for the end of 2006-07. The children are voting with their feet against the healthier options. That is not to say that we are defeatist. We will get an element back over time, but it will require a lot of investment, promotion, marketing and incentivisation.
The new Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act 2006, which provides for the partial abolition of school boards, will be helpful because it will allow us to approach the parents forums innovatively. Our figures are much like Fergus Chambers's, so we are hoping that a fresh approach to parents, via the legislation to create forums that include all parents, might influence the youngsters to accept that what we are offering is good.
I am trying to get at whether children from poor backgrounds are still using their money to buy food rather than getting it free from school. That is my worry.
Fewer children, with either cash or free meal tickets, are using the service.
Is there a difference in pupils' views on the uptake of breakfasts based on school? Is there a marked attitudinal difference? You said that secondary schools are more challenging because of teenagers' attitudes to food consumption and their social behaviour. Do pupils feel more comfortable with the breakfasts compared with the lunch options?
We have done quite a lot of market research on the breakfast service, because—this goes back to Frances Curran's question—we did not know whether 20 or 30 per cent was the right target. The research indicated a high level of acceptability of the service. I do not think that the children who come to a primary school breakfast service have any problem with the food that is available, with how it is served or with how they are supervised in the dining environment.
If you wanted to address that, would there be fairly substantial staffing implications and space requirements? I will draw on my experience. My constituency office is beside a secondary school and we have, in the past year, noticed a marked increase in the number of children in front of shops, which is causing wider social problems with litter and so on. We have had discussions with the head teacher about the concerns, and he has said that he does not have the space or the staff to deal with it.
Glasgow has a good history, particularly in secondary schools, with the revolution of the fuel zone concept. We went from the straight-line counter to multiple service points, thereby speeding up the process by investing in the service.
This question might be somewhat premature, given that you are still waiting for the nutritional standards. However, in its submission, COSLA expresses concern that changes in standards could lead to a substantial increase in costs. I imagine that you are already discussing hungry for success and that you are attempting to formulate a consensual approach to the matter, but what kind of wrecking ball in the nutritional standards would drive your costs up?
I am fortunate in that I was on the expert working group and have had sight of and know about the proposals. Everyone in the group is a highly dedicated professional and no one is going against the health agenda. My concern is that, when everything is packaged up, the outcome might be a further reduction in the uptake of either free or paid for school meals at secondary school.
We estimate that, in North Lanarkshire, banning the products that Fergus Chambers mentioned would cost a substantial six-figure sum.
In its submission, COSLA also makes a strong point about the need for more capital investment. We have had a brief tangential discussion about that, but if, as a result of the bill, certain duties were placed on education authorities, is not it inevitable that they would need to increase their capacity at some level to ensure that the promotions were successful, and to meet any new standards for, or expectations about, school meals?
I think the submission was written before anyone had knowledge or sight of the expert working group's proposals. As I said earlier, if the new proposals are implemented in secondary schools, no investment in new equipment will be needed because there will not be such numbers of kids going through the facility. In primary schools, however, where service acceptability is high, there might be a strong argument for examining facilities. Of course there are ways around that but, with a bit of capital investment, it might be possible to increase capacity.
In that respect, is there a world of difference between schools that have been constructed and developed through conventional procurement and schools that have been constructed through public-private partnerships? Would you, for example, have to renegotiate the PPP contracts?
No. From my experience, the facilities in Glasgow's secondary schools are excellent. We would all like more space, but there are limitations in that regard.
Do you have concerns about the current and projected downturn in employment? After all, the number of customers—if I can call them that—is crucial to revenue.
No detailed work has yet been done on that. At some stage, we will have to form a view on the need to combat the downturn in income with a reduction in staffing levels. It is fair to say that the design of a facility dictates the number of staff that are required to man it. Thus far, we have maintained our staffing levels in the hope that we will get back our former volume of customers. Change always results in a surge or a downturn in numbers; we have, as a result of the health agenda, had a downturn in numbers. I hope that we do not have a further downturn, as jobs would eventually be affected.
The statistics on the downturn in numbers as a result of hungry for success are interesting and worrying. Is there a difference on chip day? Are you busier on the days when chips are on offer?
It used to be fish on a Friday.
It depends on which school you went to.
The secularisation of society.
Traditions have gone.
That was the case in the early days. As pupils came to accept the new service, having chips on the menu made less of a difference. I agree that fish is popular, but so are many other items on the menu. I would not worry too much about it.
Is the issue one of people not being keen on healthy food? Are the menus on days when unhealthy chips are on offer more popular with pupils or are they stopping using the school service and not coming back?
That was the case in the early days, but it is less of an issue now. The caterers have become smarter. They are developing items that are healthier and popular.
You said that you cannot tell us as yet what the financial implication of the downturn will be. Can you give us an estimate of how much you are saving or losing as a result of the downturn?
Since August, my service's cash takings—the physical cash that we take from people who pay for meals—have been down £2,000 every day. Takings from free meal tickets are also down about 15 per cent. The value of the ticket is £1.15, so we could do the numbers. There is a big difference. I forecast that the deficit resulting purely from the downturn will be £750,000 by the end of this financial year. At the moment, I am still selling carbonated drinks, albeit that they are fewer in number and mostly of the diet variety. We are also selling items of confectionery, snacks and crisps.
One local authority—it may have been Glasgow City Council—estimated how much an authority could lose if all snacks and fizzy drinks were taken out of vending machines. As we have seen in the media, parents down south are prepared to push chips through the school fence. Obviously, there is the potential for people to bring snacks and fizzy drinks into school.
In Glasgow, I have seen parents pass chips to their youngsters through the school gate. I am not sure how far this could go—nobody will know until it happens—but there is a huge danger that, by going down an eminently understandable road under the health agenda, we will destroy the school meals service.
Will you be able to give us an estimate of possible loss of income?
In all honesty, no one is able to guess that.
My local authority is fairly hopeful that, in the medium term rather than the long term, things will improve as a result of our work with the local health authority on the hungry for success programme. Yesterday, we spent a whole morning giving more than 100 establishments—nurseries, primary schools and as many as half a dozen out of 26 high schools—bronze, silver and gold awards for the promotion of healthy eating. We also showed a 20-minute DVD that gave examples of what is happening in schools. I am therefore hopeful that healthy eating ideas are coming through strongly, especially in dozens—almost all—of our primary schools.
Eliminating stigma is one of the hungry for success priorities, and it is one of the motivations behind Frances Curran's Education (School Meals etc) (Scotland) Bill. How much would it cost an authority to implement measures to ensure that youngsters are not stigmatised by their entitlement to free school meals?
In Glasgow City Council we have a debit card system for all 29 secondary schools. We are also rolling out a pilot scheme in 11 primary schools, out of a total of about 175. On average, it costs £15,000 in primary schools and about £30,000 in secondary schools. There is also a relatively small amount to come from on-going revenue budgets. The £15,000 and the £30,000 are the initial investments for the technology.
In discussions on Frances Curran's bill, it has been argued that the money to be spent on eliminating stigma could be used to fund free school meals. Do you agree?
I am sorry; I have not done the numbers.
I am looking at figures for the take-up of school meals in different local authorities. Glasgow is just above average. If I look at the numbers and try to set a statistical upper control limit and lower control limit, I see that the only local authorities that outperform the average are Argyll and Bute Council, Highland Council, Orkney Islands Council, Shetland Islands Council and Midlothian Council. I presume that that is because those councils have a different profile—different demography and perhaps less deprivation than other local authorities. Midlothian has made a remarkable turnaround since 1999—a 36.7 per cent take-up has gone up to 70.7 per cent. Have you examined how Midlothian has achieved that? Are there lessons to be learned from Midlothian or from rural schools?
I was a member of the original hungry for success expert panel, as I think it was called in those days, which visited Midlothian in its efforts to develop best practice throughout Scotland. The local authority was doing certain things—as were others—that we built into the process. Midlothian started from a low base and was doing a very good job. The council was highly successful in that respect and had lots of committed staff. That is what should be happening throughout Scotland.
Secondary schools. The Midlothian figure went up from 36.7 per cent to 70.7 per cent between 1999 and 2006.
That is extremely good.
It is.
There are many possibilities, and I am sure that each local authority is doing an awful lot—I am sure that North Lanarkshire Council is, and Glasgow City Council certainly is. A lot of consultation and work with community groups is going on. There is also a lot of work to engage with parents in particular and encourage them to come in and see the service. Parents get an awful lot of anecdotal reports from their children, which we are trying to address.
I want to check the figures that you gave for Glasgow. Did you say that the take-up of free school meals was 87 per cent in primary schools and 61 per cent overall?
Those are projected figures for the end of the financial year.
That is after one year of hungry for success.
That is not strictly true; I need to qualify it. Hungry for success has been in place in primary schools for more than a year. In secondary schools, we are not due to meet the hungry for success target until December, but we implemented our model from the end of August, and that is what has brought the secondary school figure down by about two percentage points in the current financial year.
Are those figures—the 87 per cent and 61 per cent—for primary schools?
The 87 per cent and the 61 per cent are both for primary schools.
And they are for Glasgow.
The 87 per cent is for free school meals and the 61 per cent is for combined free and cash.
Those are not bad figures.
No, but we want them to be better.
So do I.
We want our business, if I can call it that, to go up, not down.
I am interested in the period in which the take-up settled down. What happened at the beginning of hungry for success? Did take-up drop?
I cannot personally shed any light on that. I query the figure that you quoted for Glasgow, because I checked it this morning. I suggest that, currently, the food cost per customer in Glasgow is the same for a primary school as it is for a secondary school, which is between 95p and £1. One impact of hungry for success is that it has allowed us to put more on the plate. There is no question about that. The figure of 60p-odd that you quote might have been the case two years ago, but nowadays it is between 95p and £1.
You said that 95p is the food cost. Does that exclude supervision and other matters? Is it purely the cost of the food?
It is the cost of the food on the plate.
Are supervision costs and other overheads additional to that?
They are.
Can you quantify them?
I am not sure that I can, because I would need to work them out. About 50 per cent of the cost of putting a primary school meal on the plate is food and 50 per cent is labour and overheads, but that is a very rough figure. Glasgow City Council spends £5.7 million a year on its primary school meals service. I would need to sit down with an accountant in order to answer your question.
It would be interesting to have that question answered, so that we are clear about how much is spent on food and how much is spent on non-food overheads. Glasgow is a particularly interesting case, given the concentration of deprivation and the thrust of both bills.
We find that the local licensing committee is sometimes inclined to grant licences to such people unless the school objects. In recent times, we have managed to distance such vans from some schools, especially high schools, but it is difficult for us to remove some established vans that have been there for years. Our legal department tells us that there is not much that we can do about them. The matter should be addressed, as there is not much point in investing heavily in the provision of good, wholesome and healthy meals for youngsters when they can visit a van that is parked outside and get a roll, a glass of lemonade and a bag of chips for £1.
Is the van issue a matter for joined-up government at Executive and local government levels? Is there departmentalism that we need to address? I presume that there is a policy intent that is being frustrated by a lack of proper regulation of the vans. If you are required by legislation to go further down the nutritious meals route but there is no parallel requirement on your competitors, that creates an uneven playing field. Is that fair?
Something has to be done about it. I had an unhappy experience about three months ago. My village has a high school and a primary school on the same campus, and almost next door there is a home for the elderly with 48 elderly people in it. A van that was new to the area came along and parked in a small car park that was beside the home for the elderly and prevented people from getting in or out. Someone went out and told the guy that he was not allowed to be there because it was a private car park for access to the home and for use by the local registrars and social work department. The guy gave the messenger a mouthful but, reluctantly, moved on just a few feet down the road. About 10 minutes later, when some of the children were coming out of the schools—we cannot prove this—we reckon that he gave the kids some eggs that they threw at the windows of the old folks home. We had to send for the police.
Let me ask a different question that might provoke a similar response. There is a major issue to tackle in terms of the dietary health of the nation. School meals are one aspect of that. Do you sometimes feel that the whole thrust of changing the dietary health of the nation is too closely focused on school meals at the expense of other aspects of health improvement, which need to be tackled in parallel with the same energy and force?
I do not think that anybody minds there being a degree of attention on an area of service but, at current uptake levels, school meals represent between 8 and 14 per cent of a child's diet over a year—that is the bottom line. We are, essentially, talking about one meal a day for 190 days in the year. You can do the maths yourselves. Yes, we can influence and improve diet through school meals, but children need to be prevented from coming into school with, frankly, rubbish in their bags; they need to be actively discouraged from going either to the van outside the school gate or to the chip shop that is, in some cases, 60yd away from the front of the school; and they need some incentive or encouragement from their parents to eat healthily. I am not sure that trying to tackle the problem in isolation will achieve a huge amount for the health of the nation, as school meals make up only between 8 and 14 per cent of a child's diet.
In that context, on the basis of your evidence, does whether school meals are free or not make a difference?
We must make the service popular and acceptable to children. At least in schools we have the opportunity to educate and influence them. If we drive them out of the dining hall and on to the street, not only do we lose that opportunity but, perhaps more important, we create all sorts of social and community problems. That takes us back to what happened in the CCT days.
The committee has no further questions. We will take evidence from Executive officials and from Frances Curran next week.
I have a quick question.
Can we take it next week? You will be giving evidence then.
I know, but I cannot answer for COSLA.
Okay. One quick question.
Would COSLA be in favour of the Scottish Executive funding free healthy school meals in primary schools?
I would have to take that question back to COSLA. On more than one occasion, COSLA has resisted any suggestion that there ought to be a specific free school meals bill for reasons that have been stated on several occasions. Probably the most cogent of those is that the meal would be given to the majority of youngsters, many of whose parents could well afford to purchase school meals. There would also need to be additional investment for more staff and capital changes to buildings.
I thank the witnesses for coming along. I suspend the meeting for a couple of minutes.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—