3,000 calls made to Wolverhampton Council for free school meals by first day of half term

The authority is among a mix of organisations which have volunteered their time and resources to send out food to families.

It comes after MPs voted against a Labour motion to back Manchester United and England star Marcus Rashford’s scheme to extend free school meals for all holidays until next summer.

Wolverhampton Council has said it will pay for free school meals for 16,000 children this half term, and by Monday evening had about 3,000 calls for parcels, while schools had given out 3,000 vouchers.

Council leader Ian Brookfield helped to deliver parcels to those in need on the first day of half term.

He said: "This is the start of our emergency operations to make sure that none of the children in our city who receive free school meals go without food. It's a decision we made late last week after the circumstances changed and I think it was the right thing to do.

"There's a lot of people with other jobs who are here, volunteering their time and helping out and it just shows you that in Wolverhampton, we look after our own.

"A lot of the school are handing out vouchers, but not all schools can do this, so we put on a phone bank for people to contact if they hadn't had contact with them, and by Saturday lunch time, we'd logged about 2,000 people and it's grown since then, with just goes to show the level of demand out there.

"It doesn't surprise me the level of response we've had as, going back five months ago, we delivered one and a quarter million meals to people in the city who were shielding and vulnerable, so that infrastructure is already there.

'Fundamental'

"People have worked hard to get this put together and we'll make sure all the meals are delivered by tomorrow.

"It's fundamental to me to be able to look after kids because if we can't do that, there's just no point. Myself and my group are fundamentally behind the services we can provide for our children.

"We're not going to cut our children's services in the council anymore. It's a bold statement, but it's something we believe in.

"The vote last week was disappointing as we were under the assumption that things would continue and we never got any correspondence to say that the money you've received in June would take this into account. We could have done with a bit more time, but we'll make sure we come through for the people of this city."

Mother-of-two Sandeep Kaur was one of the first to receive a food parcel.

The 34-year-old said: "I'm very happy to have received this parcel from the council as it will really help me and the children at home.

"If we didn't have this, we'd have to work a lot harder to get food deliveries, so it's really good to see the council doing this to help everyone.

"My children are really happy too as they'll have food to eat while they're not at school, so it's really good all round."