An inquiry has found David Seymour’s cost-cutting overhaul of the free school lunches programme beset by poor planning, inadequate monitoring, waste and low nutritional standards, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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An inquiry from the auditor-general has found David Seymour’s cost-cutting overhaul of the free school lunches programme beset by poor planning and inadequate monitoring, with little evidence that waste is being reduced or nutritional standards consistently met. As The Spinoff’s Alice Neville wrote yesterday: “It’s saving money. But that’s about it.”

The inquiry was launched in 2025 after a disastrous January rollout and complaints from suppliers who lost contracts under the revised model, which cut the cost per student from around $8 to $3 – a change Seymour secured through Act’s coalition agreement with National.

Nutrition: ❌

As Neville reported in her summary of the report, only 50% of meals delivered in 2025 complied with Ministry nutrition standards – a figure the School Lunch Collective disputed to the NZ Herald’s Thomas Coughlan, saying compliance was 69% in Term 3 and 75% in Term 4. Labour’s education spokesperson Ginny Andersen called it “completely unacceptable,” telling RNZ’s Russell Palmer the lunches were “a waste of money” if they weren’t being eaten. 

Seymour pushed back, telling the Herald there was a necessary trade-off: “When you put more vegetables in, it reaches the standard and fewer children want to eat them… Some of the most popular meals, the likes of butter chicken, may not reach the standards but that the children like – we try and balance that off.”

Waste: ❌

The Press’s Cate Macintosh reported surplus lunch rates averaged 10.39% in 2025, over the contract’s 10% maximum, and have since climbed to an estimated 17% in 2026 – close to 20,000 wasted meals a day.

Christchurch’s Haeata Community Campus principal Peggy Burrows said she had refused a ministry request in March to cut her school’s order from 600 to 400 lunches, calling it a “clever smokescreen” to mask substandard food. “I said no, because ethically our children are entitled to a lunch, and the reason that they are not eating them isn’t because there’s no need, it’s because they’re unpalatable.”

Daily meal numbers have also fallen from 103,000 students served last July to 78,100 this week – a change the Collective attributes to attendance rather than quality.

Process: ❌

The Spinoff report detailed how the ministry changed the model’s scope and price repeatedly – after cabinet approval, after procurement had started, and even after the contract was signed. Suppliers who withdrew because the $3 cap looked impossible later watched the ministry expand the contract for the sole remaining bidder, the School Lunch Collective, by an extra $18m for nutrition adjustments and more than $1m for rubbish collection.

The Herald reported the programme missed delivery targets on 22 of 47 measured days in Term 1, and the Collective received 51 complaints in February 2025 alone, some taking 260 working days to resolve, including a child sustaining burns from packaging.

There was also an $8m early childhood contract awarded to KidsCan: the inquiry found no direct evidence of predetermination but identified factors that “could create a perception” of it, including Seymour’s office failing to disclose a private $4m  funding bid KidsCan had made directly to him.

Cost saving: ✔️

The ministry told the auditor-general the new model saved about $130m in 2025, with a further $120m expected in 2026. While Ginny Andersen has confirmed Labour’s pledge to return to the previous model, the Herald reports that National has separately costed a return at $420m over four years.

Defending the programme in a statement to media, Seymour said the inquiry was “largely driven by former employees of the Ministry of Education and those who lost their contracts”.  

“Reading the report, it feels like the auditor-general would be happy if we spent another $360m to get the same outcome, so long as we followed his preferred process.”