I was impressed by this announcement. It was accompanied by reports of:
* Teachers bringing in packed lunches for pupils who routinely arrived at school with none
* Pupils pretending to have a packed lunch, because they didn't want to be stigmatized as poor because they got a free school meal
You can't learn if you're hungry. Teachers can't teach if there's even a few hungry pupils in the class; they become disruptive. If everybody's fed, then everybody wins.
The bureaucracy around means-tested benefits is itself costly; in some cases, it costs more than the marginal cost of making the benefit universal. These people are not "scroungers" - they're children under 8. It's common sense.
* Teachers bringing in packed lunches for pupils who routinely arrived at school with none
* Pupils pretending to have a packed lunch, because they didn't want to be stigmatized as poor because they got a free school meal
You can't learn if you're hungry. Teachers can't teach if there's even a few hungry pupils in the class; they become disruptive. If everybody's fed, then everybody wins.
The bureaucracy around means-tested benefits is itself costly; in some cases, it costs more than the marginal cost of making the benefit universal. These people are not "scroungers" - they're children under 8. It's common sense.