FOOTBALLER Marcus Rashford won a major victory when his campaign pushed the government into extending free school meal vouchers over the summer holidays. But I’d like to speak up a bit for Labour’s contribution — especially Welsh Labour.

The free school meals issue gets to the heart of the government’s response to coronavirus. When schools were closed by the “lockdown” in March, the government agreed they should give something to kids who normally get free school meals – otherwise poor kids would go hungry because of the pandemic.

The government’s solution was to give a £234 million contract to French corporation Edenred to supply supermarket vouchers to free school meals families. The system did not work well. Parents found it hard to get vouchers. The central online system crashed.

This was no surprise: local schools and local councils had good knowledge of their school pupils, and could administer the system better than a distant corporation. But that was also why Education Secretary Gavin Williamson preferred the remote French contractor.

He didn’t want to give local schools and local communities more responsibility. He didn’t want to give local people and local authorities more chances to organise. He above all didn’t want the coronavirus crisis to strengthen local authorities. He thought a big corporate contract would be easier to “turn off.”

The Welsh government had some autonomy here: this is a Labour-led administration, with Lib Dem support — which is worth mentioning as the one Lib Dem Assembly Member is also the Welsh Education Minister.

Because this Welsh Labour-led administration like their councils, they did not sign up to the Edenred scheme. They let local authorities run the free school meals service while schools were shut.

The system is a patchwork, which depends on local choices and local methods, including voucher schemes, direct payments into parents’ accounts, and food deliveries. It isn’t perfect, but the principle is to let local people decide what is the best approach for their families.

For me the Caerphilly model really stands out: Caerphilly Council organised an “army” of people, furloughed from their regular jobs, to deliver free school meals. They started with simple sandwiches but built to fresh food and cooked meals. They’ve built a social institution from scratch through solidarity.

This is precisely the kind of thing Gavin Williamson wanted to avoid — because a programme like this builds social commitment. Which meant the Welsh government decided way back in April they would continue free school meals through the summer, long before Boris Johnson was forced to do the same.

The closer people are to feeding the free school meals families, the less they were likely to stop the scheme. The Welsh scheme actually offers more per pupil — £19.50 a week rather than £15 a week. Wales’s £33m free school meals plan will cover around 100,000 kids.

In turn the Welsh plan was already putting pressure on Gavin Williamson to extend the English scheme. When summer starts, the possible media coverage of hungry kids in England and better Welsh kids over the border was a real worry. So Welsh Labour — and their Lib Dem allies — contributed to Rashford’s victory : the story also shows why the government prefers distant, centralised, privatised solutions to the coronavirus crisis.

They don’t want any of the social measures used against the virus to leave a permanent mark. They don’t want us getting ideas.