As reported by BBC news, the Department for Education should have sought better value for money from a private contract for vouchers to replace free school meals in England during the pandemic, MPs have warned
The Public Accounts Committee spending watchdog warned of “missed potential opportunities” for savings in the £425m deal with voucher firm Edenred. MPs said the DfE seemed “surprisingly unconcerned” about the firm’s profits. But Edenred rejected “entirely any suggestion of profiteering”.
A DfE statement also dismissed accusations of profiteering, adding: “In its investigation the National Audit Office acknowledged the rapid action this government took to deliver free school meals for eligible pupils, the significant improvements that were made to the scheme and our oversight of it.”
A total of £380m worth of food vouchers were issued to disadvantaged families in England between March and August 2020, when children could not get free meals in school. But in the early stages, there were “serious problems” and “unacceptable delays” with the scheme, according to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report.
Both the DfE and Edenred took over a month to realise 40,000 order codes for conversion into vouchers had not been delivered to families, say MPs.
Edenred’s website was also difficult to navigate and its systems failed to cope with the volume of calls and emails from families struggling to access the scheme. The DfE was “surprisingly unconcerned about whether Edenred was profiting from the voucher scheme at taxpayers’ expense,” said the report, “and missed potential opportunities to reduce the cost or share in the profits.”
The Edenred voucher scheme was relaunched in January this year to provide vouchers worth £15 a week to disadvantaged children in England.
Meg Hillier, the committee’s chairwoman, said: “Government’s failure to learn from its repeated contracting mistakes, over and over, large and small, is costing this nation too dear.
“After the initial urgency we have seen the government continuing to play catch up on how to support families whose children are entitled to free school meals and despite the contract with Edenred growing more than five-fold there was no discussion about tendering the contract or even renegotiating it.”
Commenting on the Public Accounts Committee report into EdenRed free school meals voucher scheme, Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “The EdenRed voucher scheme shambles caused distress and anxiety for families. It meant extra, avoidable pressure for headteachers at the time when they were working late into the night. Schools across the country stepped up to provide food parcels and emergency support to the families but there is no defence for why the issues took so long to resolve.
“The conclusion by this government committee that the DfE did not do enough to understand how schools would use the scheme highlights just one in a series of places where they haven’t listened properly to the heads and staff who are doing the job.
“It is a damning verdict to conclude that the DfE did not exercise proper control over the contract to EdenRed financially or actively scrutinise how effectively they performed. It is important that proper lessons are learned. It is time that the practical insight and expertise from heads and teachers is given much greater weight in the decisions made by the DfE.”
Responding to the report of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on the national food voucher scheme, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The launch of the Edenred national food voucher scheme at the outset of the pandemic was an absolute shambles and it put schools under huge additional pressure at what was already an incredibly difficult time.
“It adds insult to injury to see the damning conclusion of this report that the Department for Education apparently missed potential opportunities to renegotiate the contract and reduce costs, and that it seems to have been pretty complacent on this front.
“The DfE is constantly lecturing schools about the importance of running efficiently and saving costs wherever possible, but appears not to have brought the same rigour to bear on its own management of this scheme.”
Be the first to comment