by Nick Lillitos
nlillitos@thekmgroup.co.uk

You can get a hot lunch with dessert for about £2 in Maidstone – provided you’re a school kid, in hospital or behind bars.

But don't bank on all the grub being eaten at our two hospitals in Maidstone and Pembury, where food wastage tops a league table issued by the NHS Information Centre.

On price, a round-robin check reveals prisoners at Blantyre House jail, on the outskirts of Goudhurst, are having lunch at an average cost of just £2.20 per prisoner each day.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “The national Offender Management Service has national food contracts in place which means uniform prices are paid for food in prisons through England and Wales.”

A school lunch in Kent is currently costing between £2.10 and £2.20 and it’s at primary schools where young children mostly depend on a two-course meal.

Figures for this age group show 28 schools in Maidstone district cook 304,522 meals each day; in Tunbridge Wells 17 schools serve 240,338; while 25 schools in Tonbridge and Malling provide 281,340. Breakfast clubs are run independently by individual schools.

In Kent's hospitals there’s a wide disparity in the amount spent feeding each patient, with one trust, Dartford and Gravesham, forking out more than £4 a meal. That compares with £2.78 at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust – which serves about 2,000 meals each day – where there is more wastage.

The trust topped Kent’s table for ward food wastage – untouched meals – according to the NHS Information Centre.

Some 13% of meals served at the hospitals in Maidstone and Pembury were left by patients, while West Kent Primary Care Trust wasted less than 1%.
Compared to Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, average national wastage is put at just 5.89%.

A spokesman for the trust said that patients were always served a full three-course meal to give them the best chance of recovery and said this could explain higher levels of wastage.