Kids at risk after new meals budget

By David Shrimpton

Pupils' lives could be put at risk by poor hygiene if catering budgets are delegated to individual schools, the Government has been told.

The stark warning comes from the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA) in its written response to Government proposals, issued in May, to give schools full control of their own budgets.

Most councils provide a central school meals service, either through in-house or private contractors. Under the proposals, each school would be responsible for running its own service.

"To delegate the school meal budget would… without proper supervision and monitoring put the lives of pupils at risk through poor hygiene standards," warns the LACA document.

At present, the contractor is responsible for ensuring that hygiene and food safety standards are met in school kitchens and for carrying out legally required checks such as hazard analysis. But, says LACA: "The expertise in these areas is not within schools and they would have extreme difficulty in meeting these requirements."

Head teachers and governors could even be imprisoned or fined if there was an outbreak of food poisoning and they were found not to have exercised "due diligence".

Breaking up centrally held budgets for replacing old equipment would mean there was "little chance of kitchen equipment being updated, particularly where there is still a need to carry out work to comply with Food Safety Act requirements".

LACA also argues that food costs could increase by between £8m and £10m a year if the country's 22,000 schools all did their own purchasing.

And delegation of budgets would make it difficult to implement the new nutritional standards promised by education secretary David Blunkett, says LACA. Small primary schools could find themselves unable to afford a hot meals service at all.