Failing caterer leaves schools without meals

Thousands of children in the East Riding of Yorkshire are going without school meals after caterer Martin's Food Service ceased trading last Friday (13 September).

Administrator DS Insolvency Services is shutting up shop at Martin's after being unable to rescue the company.

Martin Williamson, who heads DS Insolvency Services, said Martin's had very little business when his firm was appointed last month and had various liabilities it could not deal with. Its main asset to be sold is its premises in Oswestry.

The caterer's debts, which are still being calculated, are estimated to be in excess of £3.5m. Two years ago, Martin's had an annual turnover of £30m.

Martin's main contract was a £4.5m-a-year deal to provide catering services to 160 schools in the East Riding. Following his appointment, Williamson had to make the 850 staff working on the contract redundant.

Many of the schools have now been left without a school meals service as the council has not had to provide school dinners since contracting the service out in the mid-1990s.

East Riding has some 50,000 pupils, although just 12,000 of them eat school meals. There are just 18 secondary schools, which serve 22,000 pupils, while the more numerous but smaller primary schools have 28,000.

A spokesman for East Riding council said: "We are hoping to restore service but we are still at the moment only able to provide free school meals at many of the schools."

The council has a legal obligation to provide free meals for the 2,000 children of parents on income support.

The spokesman added that secondary schools in the area had taken the school meals service in-house, but the majority of primary schools, especially those without kitchens, had been left with just free meals.

Schools now have to decide between four options: to provide only free meals for those who qualify; to limit the service to cold meals; to re-establish a hot meal service with financial, technical and supplier advice from the council; or to ask the council to tender for outside providers for individual schools or groups of schools.

The spokesman said the third option was proving most popular. He was hopeful that some districts would be able to offer hot meals by October, and that most would have an in-house hot service in place by January.

by Samantha McClary and Angela Frewin