Newcastle City Council could be forced to stop providing school meals due to escalating costs, an official has warned.
Local authority boss Christine Herriot warned this week that there is a “genuine risk” to the council’s school meals provision, as bosses grapple with how to make £24 million worth of savings to balance the civic centre’s books next year.
Neighbouring North Tyneside Council ended its school dinners provision earlier this year, outsourcing it to the private sector in a decision branded a “disgrace” by the GMB union.
And there is now a concern that similar pressures could lead Newcastle to follow suit.
The city council had predicted that it would need to subsidise its school meals service to the tune of £2.1 million this year and proposed upping its charges to schools by 50p per meal to try and save £537,000.
Questioned by lord mayor Cllr Rob Higgins at a scrutiny meeting this week over a report which identified a risk to the viability of council-run school meals due to “food and staff cost increases”, Ms Herriot confirmed that the threat was “genuine”.
The council’s director of city operations, neighbourhoods and regulatory services said: “There are three key variables – labour, food, and productivity. We have a productivity model that we run in schools when producing the school meals service and, in an ideal world, we would want to cover the cost of delivering the service.
“The council currently subsidises the provision of school meals and we are working towards putting in place proposals in order to reduce that subsidy over time. Some other local authorities, as close as North Tyneside, have stopped delivering the meals because of the impact of inflation and the cost pressures they are facing.
“We are working very hard to be as value for money as we possibly can be and wording to identify how our subsidy can be reduced.
“But there is a genuine risk to the viability of the school meals service because of the current economic conditions we operate in.”
North East mayor Kim McGuinness has recently expressed her ambition to match London by offering free school meals to every primary school pupil in the region, though admitted her office does not currently possess the funding to deliver such a plan.
The Government is due to begin the rollout of free breakfast clubs in primary schools from April 2025.
