Supermarkets are in talks aimed at bringing back Covid-style top-up vouchers to help struggling parents cope with the cost of living crisis, The Grocer can reveal.
Retailers told MPs they were in “active conversations” along with industry bodies about supermarkets offering families up to £2 a week to boost the government’s scheme.
During the pandemic, a raft of supermarkets stepped in to boost the government’s funding to help parents of young children or pregnant mums.
The scheme was struck with major technical problems which saw families stranded at tills unable to use prepaid cards, whilst retailers were also accused of not doing enough to market the scheme, before the top-ups ended after the pandemic.
However, giving evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee last week, a raft of supermarket health bosses said they were exploring ways the top-ups could be restarted.
Oonagh Turnbull, head of health and sustainable diets at Tesco, said it was “actively involved in conversations with industry bodies to see what is possible”.
She added that Tesco was also discussing ways in which a bigger marketing campaign by the industry and the government could raise awareness for families if the scheme returned.
“One of the big things with Healthy Start, for us – certainly during the Covid experience we had – was our role in helping with awareness of the scheme,” added Turnbull. “You will probably be aware that awareness of the scheme is low, and we know from partners like the Food Foundation that a lot of work needs to take place to make sure the people who are able to access the scheme do so. A big focus for us across all our businesses is to help with awareness raising.”
Sainsbury’s head of healthy and sustainable diets Nilani Sritharan said it was prepared to offer £2 top-ups to the Healthy Start scheme if the government switched back to a paper-based system, with CEO Simon Roberts having discussed the idea as part of his role on the Food Strategy Advisory Board (FSAB).
“Some of the things we particularly talk about are things such as the Healthy Start voucher and how we can help support private-sector top-ups of those.
“Those are benefits for the most vulnerable in society, and he is very keen to use his role to help unlock that with government.”
The NHS Healthy Start scheme provides eligible individuals in the UK with a prepaid card worth £8.50 per week for children under one year old, and £4.25 per week for pregnant mums and children between the ages of one and four.
However, retailers have said that for the scheme to work the government would have to move away from a digital format using prepaid cards, which was introduced towards the end of the pandemic.
“When the voucher was digitised and it moved to a Mastercard format, we had no way of easily identifying that customer in our systems to anonymously generate a coupon at the till,” said Sritharan. “It is something we have raised with the government.”
Beth Fowler, senior manager for health and sustainable choice at Asda, told the committee it was also willing to support the idea, but had concerns over how parents would spend the money if it was on a prepaid card.
“Because it is a debit card, we cannot control, for example, what customers are buying with that card, and we have concerns around topping that up for customers and it not being used on the categories government intend it to be used for.”
Aldi also said it was “open” to the idea of offering top-ups but raised concerns over how the technology would work at its tills.
“Aldi does accept Healthy Start vouchers, and we would be open to adding value at the till,” said national sustainability director Liz Fox.
“We would need to understand how we would be able to make that work. We have been talking with the NHS team recently on this.”
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