Our Directors of Public Health are delighted Ministers have chosen to safeguard a scheme providing food and activities to vulnerable children during school holidays. They advocated for a continuation of the scheme.
This comes as good news for Cheshire and Merseyside’s work to tackle Child and Family Poverty, where our recent report found that over 100,000 children are living in relative low-income families.
The public also agreed as more than a million people signed a petition from Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford calling for the scheme after a huge grassroots campaign in 2020. Strong public and political opposition pressure eventually led to the previous government rolling out the £200m-a-year holiday activities and food (HAF) programme that exists today.
