As ever, Mrs Gillan, it is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.
I begin, in the customary way, by congratulating the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon) on securing this debate. It goes without saying that, like her, we want to ensure that all pupils are healthy and well-nourished. To that end, we promote and encourage a healthy, balanced diet and healthy life choices, through school funding, legislation and guidance—the tools at our disposal. We use our legislative frameworks, such as the school food standards, to ensure that children receive a healthy, balanced diet within all educational settings.
We know, of course, that most adults and children in the United Kingdom eat too much sugar. That is why the Government recommend that we reduce our intake by eating fewer sugary foods and drinks, such as sweets, cakes and biscuits. We also know that the earlier that eating and drinking habits are ingrained, the harder it is to disrupt them and put people on a different dietary path in the future.
It is in such a context that this debate is timely, as it gives me the opportunity to explain how we are promoting a healthy, balanced diet and milk consumption within educational settings, particularly among those children who are most in need. For example, children under the age of five who attend a day care or early years setting receive milk via the nursery milk scheme, which the hon. Lady referred to. That scheme is funded by the Department of Health, so it is a cross-Government scheme, but we work together to ensure that it reaches the children who need it most. It has actually been in existence since the 1940s, so it is a very well-established route to ensure that those children who perhaps would not enjoy that level of milk consumption at the early age they need it are able to do so.
Indeed, I suspect that I was a beneficiary of that scheme in the 1970s, believe it or not, when I was at Mrs Batsen’s nursery in Wilmslow, where—from memory—I was first faced with the reality of needing to learn to share with others and not just think about myself. I was very excited on the day I was asked to be the milk monitor. The job was to go downstairs with another child—my fellow milk monitor—to collect a crate of small milk bottles for distribution upstairs among our peers. Now, we knew that there were two children absent that day, so we concocted a plan to drink two of the bottles downstairs and then bring the remaining bottles upstairs, where we would then be able to consume another bottle, knowing that there should be two bottles spare. Unfortunately, the plan did not turn out to be the grand plan that we had hoped it would be, as a number of bottles had already been taken out of the crate by the staff, who recognised that they needed to reduce the number of bottles to reflect the level of attendance. So we were caught red-handed and I was never made milk monitor again.
Consequently, when I visited Beechwood school in my constituency in 2011, on what was World School Milk Day, it was something of a surprise to be made an honorary milk monitor. That gave me an opportunity to reflect on the role that milk has played in my life, both in learning life lessons and in being able to access what is an important part of a healthy diet in those formative years as we grow up.
That is why the Government promote a healthy, balanced diet to children, using legislative frameworks such as the school food standards. Those standards, which apply to the overwhelming majority of maintained schools as well as to maintained nurseries, restrict the amount of fat, sugar and salt that can be served during the day. I heard what the hon. Lady said about the fact that there are some academies formed between September 2010 and 2014 to which those school food standards do not apply. We encourage those schools to follow the standards, but of course we keep this matter under review and in the future we will look to see how we can ensure a greater level of engagement with those standards, as they reflect exactly what we want to see happen in schools for the good of children.
The benefits of providing a healthy school meal and milk to the most disadvantaged children are well-recognised. Currently, around 1.15 million of the most disadvantaged children are eligible for and claim a free and nutritious meal. As for milk specifically, we promote its consumption as part of a healthy, balanced diet through funding, legislation and guidance.
Why do we do that? As the hon. Lady rightly highlighted, we know that milk is excellent for children’s growth and development, which is why the school food standards require lower-fat or lactose-reduced milk to be available for children who want it during school hours, and it is offered free to disadvantaged pupils. We also provide significant funding to schools to support the provision of milk, through the European Union, which I will move on to in a moment, as well as through top-up and nursery milk schemes, as part of free school meals, and more recently through universal infant free school meals, which benefit 1.4 million infants.
The hon. Lady made it clear that we have continued our commitments to the European Union scheme during our period of membership of the EU. Of course, like all areas of policy that will be moving into a domestic arena, we will carefully consider how we will continue to support schools, so that we can fulfil our obligation to provide children with a healthy and balanced diet. I cannot say at this stage where that consideration will lead us, but the fact that we can go back to the 1940s to see how Governments have provided help and support in this area is an indication of where we may want to take the evidence in future, when we come to make those decisions in a few years’ time.
Notably, we provide around £60 million each year, outside the EU arrangement, to reimburse costs for the nursery milk scheme, which is targeted at children under the age of five, to ensure that they get the important nutrients they need in those important years of development.
The hon. Lady asked about the over-fives who are still at nursery school. I will look carefully at what she said and discuss it with my ministerial colleagues. However, it is worth pointing out that over-fives who are entitled to receive a free school meal do so, and where they are entitled to a free meal they also receive free milk. Also, under the universal infant free school meals scheme that I referred to a few moments ago, free milk is available to infants if it is served as part of their lunch. We will look at the impact that is having as part of our consideration of where we go next with our commitment in this area.