Debate contribution: Education (Holiday Meal Payments) Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 13 April 2026.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

13 April 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Education (Holiday Meal Payments) Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5483895

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you for that. I have two young kids. One is at nursery. I had made notes on what to say later, but it makes sense to come to them now. Education and learning does not happen just in schools or just in term time. My son was sent tasks or homework — call it what you want — to do at home at Easter time. Many kids in our constituency have to do that on hungry bellies. That work involves thinking and using your brain; it is a form of education and development, but there are no payments to support families and children to do that. I will extend that to ask this: what if there are no school books or homeworks being used in the summer time, for example? Are children still learning and still developing if they are reading non-curriculum books, watching television programmes or even just playing and mucking about? I will add that to your comment. The Assembly is rightly criticised for not legislating. I support the legislation. I would like it to do more, but Members should vote for it. We need to stop punishing working-class children and reinstate the holiday hunger payment in time for the summer holidays. I know that the Member will make the point about the Bill's limited scope, but I say this to him directly: we should be more ambitious and look at the universal provision of free school meals all year round. I share the concern raised by the Member for Lagan Valley. I will strongly paraphrase her comments, so she may want to intervene. Basically, whose business is it if a parent or family spends money from the scheme on an extra treat or an extra trip at holiday times? What that money is spent on is not the business of anybody in the House. Are we really to develop a scheme — I do not want to give anybody ideas — that forces parents to bring receipts to the EA or whomever the payments will be issued by, with CCTV being monitored to see who is buying chocolate rather than other items? That is absurd stuff. I agree with her sentiment, although she did not frame it in the way in which I did. Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of focus on affordability. The original holiday payment scheme showed that the normal economically stringent and fiscally conservative rules could be broken when there was a health crisis and when the will was there to break them. They should be broken when it comes to meeting people's needs. They should not be in place to satisfy the British Government or the Treasury. If the will is there, the money will be found. The will is there in some parts of the House but not in others. I have a long list of ideas, if anybody wants to listen, about where that money could be found locally. When I first became involved in political campaigning — a long time ago now — it was around the issue of making poverty history globally and locally. Unfortunately, more than 20 years on, we are further away from that. It is disgraceful that we have one in three children in my constituency living in poverty. We need to address that issue. The holiday hunger payment scheme will not address poverty, but it will be a step in the right direction. I urge Members to support the Bill on that basis. My final point is about benefits and welfare support. Members have made valid points about that. People who are on universal credit should not be financially penalised for receiving a small but important payment. If we are saying that a small but important sum of money could lead to people being penalised, kicked off benefits or whatever the situation may be, that really shines a light on how broken our welfare system is across the board. However, that is a wider debate that I will not be allowed to get into. The Principal Deputy Speaker may not have heard me, but she will not let me go there.

688 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:21 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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