Associate Education Minister David Seymour says critics of the Government’s revamped school lunch programme were “nitpicking” over the late delivery of meals.
Speaking to Q+A with Jack Tame, Seymour said problems with delivery at the beginning of the programme had been addressed and that 99% to 100% of meals were being delivered on time on most days.
However, data from the Ministry of Education showed that 97.3% of lunches were delivered on time this week, meaning that lunches for more than 13,500 students were late.
Seymour said the reason for the decrease was a day of interruptions on Wednesday, on which 90% of meals were delivered on time.
“If you think about business and how life works, not many people are delivering at 99%-100% every day.”
He said those who wanted to “nitpick” the numbers of late deliveries were welcome to do so.
“I tend to look at it the other way, which is that it’s not what happens in life. It’s how you deal with it. We’ve overcome all those problems to get to a very high percentage of performance.
“I think part of this whole saga is that it’s shown the way people decide to jump on every little detail of the largest food delivery programme in New Zealand history, when in reality, there’s a whole lot of people who say, ‘we enjoy these meals, they’re better than what we had last year’.”
Seymour denied Opposition accusations that he was deliberately tanking the programme because he opposed it.
“It’s absolutely true that I campaigned against this policy, but I’m now in a coalition with parties who do want it to continue.”
The school lunch system under Labour was “unsustainable”, he said.
“Labour’s budget, as it went out of government, did not have any money for the school lunch programme in 2025, 2026 or any year, subsequently.
“To make it sustainable, we have halved the cost by doing it more efficiently. Each time there’s been a problem, we’ve dealt with it and it’s getting better.”
The revamped programme has experienced a raft of issues since its launch. Some schools have complained about meals arriving late, or even not at all.
Other schools have complained about “frozen” and “burnt” school lunches with plastic melted into its contents, with many children opting to skip on the meals entirely. One Gisborne school has been feeding the lunches to their pet pig.
“Every day, they’re all coming up to line up and throw it away ’cause they’re not into it,” one Nūhaka School teacher told 1News on Tuesday.
An investigation by multiple agencies was launched last week after a Gisborne student was reportedly burnt by one of the lunches.
One of the scheme’s three main providers, Libelle – which provided around 125,000 meals a day – went into liquidation on Tuesday. Yesterday, Libelle agreed to sell its lunch operation to Compass Group NZ, the main lunch provider.
Seymour met with Education Minister Erica Stanford on Wednesday to discuss “a range of issues around the school lunch programme and how it’s getting better and what our plan to do that is”.
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of NZ On Air