Politics Blog - February 26

Spending on the lunch programme has to be less than the $350 million a year spent now, ACT leader David Seymour says.

A 30% to 50% saving "would be in the ballpark", he told RNZ on Monday.

His job is to put a proposal to Cabinet that "makes sure that we continue to deliver food to those where we believe it can make a difference, but not to have a wholesale wastage, untargeted expenditure of taxpayer money", Seymour said.

There was agreement across the coalition partners that "some form of programme" would be kept, but it had to be better targeted.

There were three things that could change - the number of schools, the number of children within a school getting the lunches, and the ways the programme was delivered. "All of those are in open discussion."

On Tuesday, Seymour told Breakfast the Ministry of Education did not have any hard evidence that the programme was making a difference for children across the board. 

The ministry had done five studies on the programme. None of them asked the basic question: "If we compare the students that got the school lunches, with the students that didn't, have we seen an improvement in kids getting to school, and kids achieving?"

"It's certainly true that kids being well looked after, well nourished, are going to do better overall. But, of course, kids that are missing meals potentially have other problems in the home," Seymour said.

He was looking at what benefits were being provided by the programme. "My job is to come up with a way of getting as much benefit as we can for the kids who truly need it, while also saving money so that we can balance the books."

His question to those in the education sector was whether they was confident the $350m a year being spent on school lunches was being used well, considering NCEA results and student attendance were getting worse.