It is a pleasure to have such a long time in which to debate this subject; I had not expected that.

Free fruit and vegetables, such as carrots, have been provided for all infant-age children in English schools since the end of 2004. The introduction of the service followed pilots in 2000 and 2001 showing minimal delivery problems, strong support from children and staff, and even stronger support for the scheme as part of teaching children about healthy eating. I shall expand on the nature of the scheme, and on how it relates to the educational process and goes beyond health. The social process of distributing the fruit and eating it collectively was thought valuable, and there was a reported improvement in the ethos and atmosphere in classes.

Straddling the introduction of the national scheme, a major research project was undertaken, based on a large sample of schools in 2003, 2004 and 2005. It showed, predictably, that fruit consumption rose among those in the scheme, and fell back once children ceased to qualify, effectively to the level of the control group who had never been in the scheme. Sadly, it also showed that children from deprived areas consumed less fruit than those in more affluent areas even when it was available. However, a similar increase in consumption occurred while they were in the scheme.

Research by the National Foundation for Educational Research published in 2007 showed a material increase in the proportion of children consuming five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, but also showed that a pupil in year 3-the year immediately after the scheme ends-was less than half as likely to consume five portions a day as a younger child. Since, laudably, the Government have also been supporting improvements in school meals, it is hard to separate the benefits in terms of overall consumption of fruit and vegetables of the fruit scheme from those of other activities that the Government have supported, but the research suggested that those eating school meals, as opposed to packed lunches, were benefiting most.

It was also clear that the full benefits of dietary change, in combating obesity, would occur only if fruit and vegetable consumption was substituted for consumption of sweets and desserts. It was not clear that that was happening. In other words, children were often consuming the extra fruit and vegetables at school, but not necessarily cutting out the sweets and other items available to them. The full benefit of the additional fruit and vegetables was therefore not being felt.

It should not need to be explained why we should be interested in this issue. Fruit and vegetables provide critical vitamin and fibre intake for the body. Obesity in children both limits their ability to participate fully in school and threatens their health in the longer term. The staff of my hon. Friend the Minister will have been able to trace a chain of questions that I have asked since 2007. She nods in assent. Why have I been interested? Naturally the health policy arguments are persuasive anyway, but I was struck by something else: it is remarkable how popular this scheme is in schools, and how easily and efficiently it works.

Let me give an example. Last Friday I visited one of the smallest primary schools in my Constituency, in the village of Shardlow. I did not mention that I would be raising this topic in the House. In fact, as the Minister knows, I did not know that I would be raising it, because the subject of my motion has changed. However-quite unprompted-the head mentioned the popularity of the scheme in the school. She said that it was one of the Government's great successes in education.

I have visited schools in which the scheme has been worked into classroom activities and integrated in the work of catering staffs, where they exist. In some of the small primary schools in my constituency there is no kitchen, but in many there is, and there is an opportunity to bring the work of the catering staff into the school My constituency recently produced the school cook of the year. It has a strong track record in school catering, which, as I have mentioned, is closely related to this area of policy of producing better nutritional standards for schools. There are regular references by head teachers and other staff to the scheme being a shared social activity. Eating fruit is a popular activity that can be linked to important subjects such as sharing and to getting across the nutritional content of fruit, while relating that to other parts of the school curriculum. Among many schemes that are seen by some to have burdened schools and to have had relatively limited effect, this is a shining star.

So when the European Union published a proposal to support a Europe-wide school fruit scheme stretching beyond our own and covering children up to the age of 10, I was delighted. Surely that would provide an additional incentive to extend the UK scheme. The total costs of extending the scheme to all primary-age children would be £84 million a year, according to a parliamentary answer given late last year. That would roughly double the cost of the scheme, which costs around £43 million now. The European Union has set aside an indicative sum of just over €11 million for UK participation in the scheme. As is normal, the EU insists that any funding it provides be matched; the money cannot be used to replace existing Government funding. The marginal cost to the Department, depending on the use of the funding by the other authorities within the UK-an excellent Scottish scheme broadly parallels the English version-would be a little over £30 million. For the health impact that that would have on millions of children, the associated educational benefits and-perhaps this is one of the origins of the European interest in this issue-the impact on the horticulture sector in this country, it seems a startling bargain.

We would have difficulty making an administrative mess; all the key structures and supply chains are already there and working effectively. The reason why the head at Shardlow drew this to my attention was that the delivery man had just arrived with the fruit. It was greeted with enthusiasm and he was asking for directions to a nearby school. The quality of the fruit was excellent and the scheme is popular with children. I have often asked the children which is the most popular fruit. Apparently, tomatoes are mentioned, although not enthusiastically, carrots are not enthusiastically eaten by tiny children, and apples and bananas are very popular. It is all working, something that cannot often be said of Government initiatives. We can build on it and we know it works. Little can go wrong. In policy terms, it is called low-hanging fruit-an easy target for policy development.

It seemed so obvious to me that I assumed that the Government were keen to press ahead too with extending the age range, but extracting answers about our intentions once the EU decided to proceed 12 months ago has been hard. In July this year, a parliamentary answer from my hon. Friend the Minister of State referred to

"a number of pilots and evaluation projects currently under way that are looking at the school fruit and vegetable scheme".-[ Hansard, 14 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 233W.]

However, when I asked when those might be completed, my hon. Friend replied that there were no current pilots. Among the questions that I would like my hon. Friend to address is how this seeming confusion arose.

I can speculate. The scheme is very popular in schools. The Scottish Executive commissioned research that found that it was

"one of the most successful initiatives of its kind" with the only reservation being mine-that it did not cover more children. The scheme has strong support from horticultural interests, which could be a reason for the EU's enthusiasm, as agricultural interests are much more closely aligned with the political process in the EU. Yet the English scheme lies within the budget of the Department of Health, which inherited it from the lottery. I sense a policy orphan-a policy not invented here and not fitting precisely the strategies defined by the Department's team.

I have found a similar attitude locally: "It is a nice scheme which we are happy to see continue, but we are rather more enthusiastic about other strategies for dealing with child nutrition and obesity." Some of the examples in Derbyshire are focused on the extremity of need in children-on the very obese and those with severe problems with the nutritional content of their food. Those are highly expensive and focused programmes that are needed in many ways but cannot be seen as comparable to the universal fruit and vegetable scheme.

I would not argue that the school fruit and vegetable scheme is more than a part of a strategy for addressing the health of our primary-age children. Better school meals, stronger advice and labelling-I support a more aggressive approach to that for children's food-the promotion of physical activity, and support for parents through initiatives such as Sure Start which help build solid foundations for feeding children appropriately, all play an important part.