However, it concluded that while the cost of the programme had reduced, \u201cif students are not eating or only partially eating meals, or if the meals are not nutritionally sound, the Programme might not be achieving all its intended outcomes\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Auditor-General, a parliamentary watchdog for Government spending, opened an inquiry into the lunches in 2025 after numerous complaints. <\/p>\n
The report, which was tabled in Parliament today, noted suppliers of Labour\u2019s previous school lunch programme complained after they felt the Ministry had ended their contracts at short notice, without proper communication.<\/p>\n
However, the Auditor-General also received complaints from firms which tendered unsuccessfully to run the new programme. <\/p>\n
The Auditor-General\u2019s report validated some of these concerns, highlighting questionable procurement practices. <\/p>\n
The Auditor-General found multiple instances of poor performance. <\/p>\n
In Term 1 of 2025 the programme \u201cwas unable to meet its delivery targets on 22 of the 47 days measured\u201d.<\/p>\n
Crackles the Pig in happier times when N\u016bhaka School would donate their uneaten school lunches to its trough.<\/p>\n
The School Lunch Collective, the consortium of suppliers contracted to deliver the lunches, received 51 complaints about the lunches in February 2025 alone.<\/p>\n
Some complaints were dealt with relatively quickly, and were resolved within a day. Others took 260 working days to resolve.<\/p>\n
The Auditor-General noted an already-publicised incident of a child sustaining burns, as meal packaging was not suitable for reheating in commercial ovens. <\/p>\n
The Ministry told the Auditor-General those delays represented an \u201cunprecedented increase\u201d in the number of incidents, which reflect \u201csignificant structural and staffing changes\u201d within the School Lunch Collective and school holidays affecting incident resolution.<\/p>\n
Complaints over procurement – officials <\/p>\n
The report was critical of the way the school lunch contract was procured. <\/p>\n
The Ministry of Education developed a \u201cpack and go\u201d lunch model costing about $3 a meal. The cost was \u201ccaveated\u201d, the report said and did not include delivery and distribution costs. <\/p>\n
The Ministry raised concerns that the \u201cproposed model might not meet students\u2019 nutritional needs and would create operational complexity for schools running two different lunch models simultaneously (that is, separate lunch programmes for different age groups\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Ministry noted several other big concerns. It said it had not \u201ctested the $3 a student cost with the market or thoroughly analysed the cost\u201d. <\/p>\n
Officials warned that capital investments made under the previous model, in which lunches were prepared locally, would have a lower return on investment. <\/p>\n
Conversely, some schools, particularly those with larger rolls, might need additional funding for new equipment.<\/p>\n
The new model had a greater role for school staff, adding work, and making them work in ways they were not trained for, which could result in lower compliance with food safety standards. <\/p>\n
The $3 per lunch cost was diluted after the contract was awarded, as additional requirements for the lunches became clear. <\/p>\n
Starting the second stage of the procurement process before finalising the design of the Alternative Provision Model led to concerns about fairness among suppliers.<\/p>\n
The Auditor-General said there were \u201cconcerns about fairness among suppliers\u201d \u2013 in particular, among those \u201cwho had withdrawn from the procurement after concluding they could not deliver all aspects of the Alternative Provision Model for the $3 cost\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It noted officials had raised concerns with the Ministry of Education, that its briefings and draft Cabinet papers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[836,3225,95,112460,250678,250677,10666,77631,34088,18432,186171,121,11424,2964,51705,85555,4515,9862,5978,42677,28874,111,43,139,5006,556,15404,69,2847,9527,60509,1560,100842,4062,11422,8222,3608,102],"class_list":["post-502109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-836","tag-according","tag-and","tag-auditorgeneral","tag-complied","tag-costed","tag-cuts","tag-damning","tag-delivered","tag-did","tag-educations","tag-fail","tag-finds","tag-half","tag-lunch","tag-lunches","tag-meals","tag-meet","tag-might","tag-ministers","tag-ministry","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-not","tag-nutrition","tag-nutritional","tag-nz","tag-only","tag-programme","tag-properly","tag-report","tag-scathing","tag-school","tag-standards","tag-warned","tag-were","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}