The holiday hunger bill Northern Ireland legislators are advancing through Stormont would, if passed, restore payments of £27 per child per fortnight to families during school holidays, payments axed by the Department of Education in March 2023 on grounds of cost.
Sinn Féin assembly member Danny Baker introduced the Education (Holiday Meal Payments) Bill 2026 formally on 3 March 2026. It has since passed its Second Stage and moved to committee, where it now faces scrutiny ahead of a potential vote. The estimated annual cost of reinstating the scheme is about £20 million.
The numbers tell you something about the scale of the problem. BBC News reports that more than 96,300 children in Northern Ireland were entitled to free school meals in the 2022/23 school year, representing roughly 30% of the entire school population. Sinn Féin’s own reporting on the bill cites 90,000 children as the target group; the 2022/23 data from BBC News suggests the true figure may now be higher.
What the Holiday Hunger Bill Would Actually Fix
When the Northern Ireland Executive first introduced holiday food payments in July 2020, the scheme was a direct response to the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was never designed to be permanent, and that temporariness became its undoing. When the Department of Education cut it in 2023, the then-permanent secretary Dr Mark Browne described it as the most difficult decision he had to make.
Susan Lilley, a single mother of two training to become a classroom assistant, received the grant during the pandemic. She is precise about the trade-off she now faces without it. ‘I can go and buy a 35p donut versus a £4.50 box of strawberries,’ she said, ‘but it won’t fill her the same, won’t give her the brain power for school. It will actually damage her more.’
That is not sentiment. It is a nutritional calculation being performed at the checkout by a parent who already knows the answer before she puts anything in the basket.
The Holiday Hunger Bill Northern Ireland Needs to Get Right on Eligibility
Here is where I think the bill’s advocates should tread carefully. Restoring the payments is right. But the eligibility criteria the payments would flow through are, by the evidence, badly calibrated.
A briefing paper from the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People (NICCY), drawing on analysis by Dr Nicole Gleghorne of Queen’s University Belfast using Family Resource Survey data from 2017 to 2020, found that the current free school meals eligibility criteria are ‘extremely inaccurate’. Only 59% of children in poverty are eligible for free school meals. And only a third (34%) of children who are eligible for free school meals are actually experiencing poverty.
That is a system simultaneously excluding children who need the support and directing money toward households that, by poverty measures, do not. Reinstating holiday payments on top of broken eligibility criteria will not fix that misalignment. It will replicate it.
Education Minister Paul Givan raised the income threshold for free school meals eligibility from £15,000 to £15,390 from the 2025/2026 academic year, as confirmed by the Department of Education Northern Ireland. A £390 adjustment against a background of cumulative food price inflation is not a meaningful reform of eligibility. It is maintenance.
Lauren Entwhistle, who works at Atlas Women’s Centre in Lisburn after seeking support there herself for postnatal depression and financial difficulties, said many of the women she now helps carefully count every penny when shopping. ‘Every time these women go to the shop they have to think about their budget,’ she said. ‘They are counting pennies.’
Siobhan Harding of the Women’s Support Network put it plainly: women act as ‘the shock absorbers of poverty in the home’, going without food, heat and clothes to ensure children have what they need. Summer compounds this. Children are at home, school uniforms must be bought, and activities cost money that is not there.
‘There is a strong body of evidence to say that there is a need for this new holiday hunger bill,’ Harding said. She is right. The NI Assembly’s call for evidence on the bill is the mechanism through which that evidence must now be properly heard, including the evidence on eligibility, not just the payments themselves.
The bill, as reported by Sinn Féin, has cleared Second Stage. Committee scrutiny is where the detail gets stress-tested. If MLAs are serious about reaching the children who most need these payments, the eligibility thresholds should be on the table alongside the payment amounts.
