School lunches being prepared (file image). Photo: RNZ / Tom Taylor
Associate education minister David Seymour has confirmed temporary funding will be put in place for the free school lunches programme until a review is completed.
Funding would continue for the "immediate few years" while officials worked out what the alternative programme would look like, Seymour said.
"They won't end, but they will continue in a different form. Right now we are saving the scheme, keeping it going for the foreseeable future until we've made those policy decisions."
Budgeting temporary funding for the programme is what the Coalition spent months criticising the previous government for doing.
It has repeatedly described Labour's time-limited funding for free lunches in school as a "fiscal cliff".
Asked by RNZ how it could accept one fiscal cliff on its watch, given its rhetoric directed at the previous government, Finance Minister Nicola Willis said she would not "categorise anything the government is doing as a fiscal cliff".
She said in the "vast majority of instances" permanent four-year funding would be allocated in the Budget on 30 May.
On Monday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told RNZ all Budget programmes would be fully funded over four years.
Associate education minister David Seymour and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon are defending the funding approach the Coalition is taking. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
"What we're focused on is delivering a Budget at the end of May where we are very transparent and very up front about our investment, so there is certainty about those programmes that we are supporting that they're fully funded," Luxon said.
But by Tuesday morning he had walked back that statement, telling Morning Report, "there will be the odd incident where we're actually putting more money into a programme where we're testing or wanting to see the results before we follow it up with more".
There would be a "handful of things where there might be time-limited funding, but again we'll be transparent about that", he said.
Luxon disagreed a handful of programmes with time-limited funding could also be described as a handful of fiscal cliffs - the name his government has given to programmes under the previous government which had not been funded beyond this year's Budget.
Seymour, who is in charge of the programme's review, is defending the funding approach the coalition is taking.
He said it was different to Labour's, which was to say it would continue the programme forever but not funding it forever.
Seymour told Checkpoint in April that funding for the programme could be cut by up to half.
He said 10,000 lunches were wasted each day and there was no hard evidence the programme, which cost about $325 million annually, improved school attendance or achievement.
Luxon said free school lunches would continue, as campaigned on by National at last year's election, but with some changes to make it more efficient.
"We believe in the programme. We are now funding the programme, but we want to make sure that it's been effective," he said.
"That's quite a good question to ask a few years down the road as the programme's got bigger and as we have made a big commitment to fund it - to make sure we're getting a return on it."
Labour launched a campaign and petition in March to save the programme.
Leader Chris Hipkins told RNZ the prime minister was saying one thing and doing another.
