PARENTS can get up to £442 worth of free food from Lidl over the year using their Healthy Start vouchers.
The state-backed coupons help low-income families with small children with the cost of milk, vegetables, fruit, pulses and vitamins.
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The vouchers are currently worth £3.10 each but the government plans to raise this to £4.25 from April 2021.
But Lidl is promising to top up the vouchers by £1.15 until the end of March to plug the gap.
It means parents and pregnant women can get £4.25 worth of food for each £3.10 voucher spent in store for an extra 13 weeks in the year.
What can I buy with Healthy Start vouchers
The vouchers can be spent on:
- Plain cow’s milk – whole, semi-skimmed or skimmed. It can be pasteurised, sterilised, long life or UHT
- Fresh, frozen and tinned fruit and vegetables including loose, pre-packed, whole, sliced, chopped or mixed fruit or vegetables, fruit in fruit juice, or fruit or vegetables in water, but not those to which fat, salt, sugar or flavouring have been added
- Fresh, dried and tinned pulses, including but not limited to lentils, beans, peas and chickpeas but not those to which fat, salt, sugar or flavouring have been added
- Infant formula milk that says it can be used from birth and is based on cow’s milk
- Women and children getting Healthy Start food vouchers also get vitamin coupons to swap for free Healthy Start vitamins.
Families that qualify for the Healthy Start scheme get one or two vouchers per week, per child, depending how old each child is.
If you have a child that’s younger than 12-months-old, you get two vouchers each week.
Under the government scheme that means 26 vouchers worth £3.10 from January to March and 39 vouchers worth £4.25 from April to December, which works out at £412.10 in free food.
But if you go to Lidl for the next three months, the early boost to £4.25 per coupon means you’ll get £442 worth of free grub.
That means you’ll be getting an extra £29.90 free per child of this age.
Pregnant women get just one voucher a week, and parents also get one voucher for each child between one and four.
Under the government scheme that means you get £206.05 for each child in that age bracket, but shopping at Lidl means you’ll get £221, which works out at £14.95 extra per child.
If you have three children between one and four, you’d get an extra £44.85.
It’s worth noting that from April, the vouchers will be worth £4.25 wherever you shop, so you only need to choose Lidl from January to March to get the boost.
Footballer and campaigner against child food poverty Marcus Rashford MBE welcomed the move.
He said: “This was one of our Taskforce’s key asks and will make a huge difference to the most vulnerable people in our communities.”
He is urging families that need that extra support to sign up to the government’s scheme.
To qualify for the voucher scheme you need to be more than 10 weeks pregnant or have at least one child under four. You also need to receive one of the following benefits:
- Income Support
- Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance
- Income-related Employment and Support Allowance
- Child Tax Credit with a family income of £16,190 or less per year
- Pension Credit
- Universal Credit with no earned income or total earned income of £408 or less per month for the family.
You also qualify if you are under 18 and pregnant, even if you don’t get any of those benefits.
To apply, you just need to download an application form from the Healthy Start website, print it off, fill it in and send it to:
Freepost RRTR-SYAE-JKCR, Healthy Start Issuing Unit, PO Box 1067, Warrington, WA55 1EG.
If you don’t have a printer, you can call the Healthy Start helpline on 0345 607 6823 and get a form sent to you.
Once your application is approved, you’ll have the vouchers posted out to you every four weeks.
The vouchers can be spent in supermarkets, corner shops, greengrocers, market stalls, pharmacies, food co-ops and milk floats or vans.
You can find your nearest shops that accept the coupons using the Healthy Start tool on the website.
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