| answer text |
<p>The Nursery Milk Scheme supplies nursery milk to over 48,000 settings annually
including local authority and private nurseries and independent child-minders. A small
minority of these settings also receive deliveries of school milk.</p><p> </p><p>
</p><p> </p><p>Proposals for modernising the nursery Milk Scheme were consulted upon
by the Department of Health in 2012 and the Government response, published in March
this year, set out plans for procurement of a direct supply Nursery Milk Scheme.</p><p>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Plans for implementing the modernised Nursery Milk Scheme have
been put together, discussed, and assessed between Government officials via a cross
Government Nursery Milk Scheme Task and Finish Group which includes representatives
from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who are responsible for the
School Milk Scheme .</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The Department has also held six
separate supplier days as part of putting together the invitation to tender documents
for the modernised Nursery Milk Scheme. These presented an opportunity for officials
to discuss proposals for the Scheme with companies from the dairy and milk delivery
sectors. These discussions included open forum question and answer sessions between
company representatives and officials from the Department of Health and, also, one
to one sessions between individual companies and Departmental officials. Some of these
discussions included references to milk deliveries for the over 5s School milk scheme.</p><p>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The specific issue of School milk deliveries to the over 5s
was also mentioned in discussions between Departmental officials and a group of key
market representatives invited to a meeting organised by Dairy UK in April 2014.</p><p>
</p>
|
|
