Lib Dems pledge to offer free school meals
The Liberal Democrats want to provide free school meals to all primary school children, in a manifesto pledge they said would be funded by a tax on share buybacks. The party said it would start by immediately extending the scheme to provide school meals to all 900,000 children living in poverty who currently miss out. Under the plan, all primary school children would be able to get free school meals once public finances stabilise. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Taxpayer experts have disputed whether your buyback tax to pay for this free school meals policy would raise anything like what you claim
00:05How did you calculate the 2 billion figure and have you taken into account the taxpayer response?
00:10Well, actually it would have collected 2.2 billion last year
00:14But we're not saying that would raise that because we've taken into account the fact that companies might change their behavior
00:20So we're only claiming 1.4 billion
00:22And if you look at other experts like the Institute of Public Policy Research
00:26If you look what happened in the United States with similar policy
00:29It can raise a substantial amount way more than the policy of a free school meals for the children in poverty
00:36Which is so so important that will cost about half a billion pounds
00:40So making sure children get a hot meal at lunchtime if they're from the poorest backgrounds are really struggling on the cost of living
00:48It's so important. So we're proposing to raise a threshold of income up to
00:52£20,000 that would mean nearly a million children who are living in poverty would get a hot meal every day
00:59I think that should be a priority in a cost-of-living crisis. It really ought to be a way of
01:06Targeting our help to people who need it the most