A CHANGE in the policy for the pricing of school meals has now been declared. In contrast to the policy of maintaining prices constant and financing an increasing proportion of the cost of meals from public funds, the government intends to abolish the paid meals subsidy, and to charge the full cost of a meal to consumers. But although some of the basic features of the new policy are now clear, many aspects of it are not. The number of children affected by the price changes is likely to be large. The raising of the price to 215 after Easter 1971 will cause approximately 495 thousand children who would otherwise be buying meals not to do s0.l It is therefore important that other aspects of the policy should be worked out and stated in the near future. Our object here is to describe some of the empirical evidence which should influence the development of the policy.It has already been shown in a number of ways that the incidence of the school meals subsidy is inefficient if its objective is taken to be to prevent or alleviate the malnutrition associated with child poverty. Data from the Family Expenditure Survey showed this for households of various compositions for 1965 and 1966.a The variations among county boroughs in 1961, and among both county boroughs and administrative counties in 1966 also showed this, since territorial efficiency in the use of resources is a necessary condition for over-all efficiency just as territorial justice is a necessary condition for over-all social justice.sThe rate of growth of the paid meals subsidy is not directly calculable from Department of Education and Science statistics, since these do not distinguish between the paid and free meals components. Our estimates suggest that had all authorities been operating the system over the whole period, the rate of increase in the paid meals subsidy would have been approximately 10 per cent per annum over the period 1957-8 to 1966-7 when the price of school meals was unchanged. As long as the pattern of seasonal variation in the two sets of uptake rates did not change over the period, the estimates should accurately reflect the rates of growth of the two components of the ~ubsidy.~ The growth of the subsidy was less smooth than that of uptake rates because the unit cost of the meal did not rise smoothly-indeed, it actually fell between 1958-9 and 1959-60. Table 1 shows time series for the paid meals subsidy and for the statistics used in its calculation.Thus the school meals subsidy is large and is growing quickly. Indeed, in the absence of price changes, its rate of growth is likely to rise during the next few years, because of *This article is based on part of a report on the school meals project
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