Having adopted a fairly successful food-voucher scheme over the summer months, the government has decided to switch things up, outsourcing the £30 per head food assistance scheme to a private firm with no competition. Indeed, ‘competition’ is supposed to be the rationale behind such decisions, with public money consistently handed over to private companies under the auspices of creating a more competitive, and more efficient service or product. The government has, once again, given in to their compulsive need to funnel public money into the hands of private business. This time at the expense of the most impoverished children in Britain.
Instead of £30 vouchers for ten days-worth of free school meals, the government has outsourced the provision of food for England’s most vulnerable children to a catering company called Chartwells.
Aside from being completely unnecessary, this decision brings to light the absolute contempt and distrust of poor people held by the current rulers of the UK. I’ve always thought the US food stamps system was degrading and cruel. Giving hungry poor people vouchers specifically for food for fear of them buying something the moneyed classes would disapprove of. Food stamps, essentially, is what our old scheme was, but even that has now been deemed too generous; too few strings attached. No longer trusted with a £30 supermarket voucher every 10 days, impoverished children and their parents have had even this stripped away- at a time when the richest in society continue to profit off the global pandemic in the form of government contracts.
A government initiative, which only happened because of public pressure from Marcus Rashford and others, has been turned into a giveaway for yet another company with ties to those in power. Chartwells is part of the foodservice giant Compass Group. The group’s chairman, Paul Walsh, was a former member of David Cameron’s business advisory group, and current donor to the party. Compass has deemed it acceptable to take the £30 per head funding from the taxpayer, and pocket all but £5.22
There is absolutely no logic behind this move. The government had already outsourced the procurement and delivery of this essential food to the actual parents who needed it, who were happy to go to Aldi themselves and seek out the best value for their money. As a child of four, I can tell you no one is better at getting the most for their money than a mum at the supermarket.
In a display of classist moralising, born out of the fear that some people might get more than they deserve, lives have been made more difficult, childhoods more miserable, and crony capitalism more naked and shameless than ever.
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