In December 2022 we looked at the patchwork provision of holiday food vouchers being offered to families with children in receipt of Free School Meals (FSM) in England.
The Shared Data Unit found the number of councils no longer offering the vouchers had continued to grow since August - with 21 having scrapped the scheme.
The Food Foundation, a charity that campaigns on food policy, said it was "vitally important" all eligible children received holiday support and said provision around England had become a "postcode lottery".
But the Local Government Association (LGA) said some councils could not afford to continue offering the schemes.
Families with children on FSM have been offered supermarket vouchers during the school holiday since footballer Marcus Rashford's successful campaign during the pandemic.
Initially they were funded directly by the government but in 2021, this was replaced by the Household Support Fund (HSF) - a grant given to councils to spend on helping vulnerable families. While most auhtorities initially provided the voucher schemes out of their grant funding, such schemes are discretional.
Methodology
The study aimed to find out how financially struggling families with children were being given food support over the Christmas holiday.
We asked all 152 upper-tier local authorities in England whether they would be running a food voucher scheme for the families of children in receipt of free school meals as well as asking them, broadly, how they would be spending their allocation of the HSF.
We managed to gather details from 125 authorities, in part by seeking out information already available on council websites.
What we found:
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21 (10%) authorities were not offering specific vouchers or cash to families with children for food over the Christmas period. However, nine of those authorities were offering one-off winter support payments specifically targeting families with children. Two authorities, Derbyshire and Calderdale, offered a voucher scheme that would run from January, rather than the Christmas break.
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94 councils offered supermarket vouchers to support families with food over the Christmas holidays.
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10 councils offered cash payments - rather than vouchers - to support families over the Christmas holidays.
Get the data
We provided partners with showing how the provision compared at local authority level alongside containing key background, findings and interviews.
There are five tabs on the spreadsheet
- A mastersheet showing all the councils in our study
- A tab showing just the councils offering one-off payments
- One showing councils not offering vouchers or cash
- One showing councils offering cash over Christmas
- One showing councils offering food vouchers over Christmas
Partner usage
The story featured on 大象传媒 online as well as bulletins on Radio 4's Today programme, 大象传媒 News and 5 Live. The story was used by several partner publications including:
- Berkshire Live: 23 December 2022.
- Kent Live: 23 December 2022.
- Liverpool World: 23 December 2022.
- Wales Online: 23 December 2022.
- Northants Live: 23 December 2022.
- Gloucestershire Live: 23 December 2022.
- Hampshire Live: 23 December 2022.
- Surrey Live: 23 December 2022.
- Cambridge News: 23 December 2022.
- Leicester Mercury: 23 December 2022
- Essex Live: 23 December 2022
- Suffolk Live: 23 December 2022.