The credibility of the much-vaunted concordat between Scottish councils and SNP ministers at Holyrood will be on the line today over the question of who should fund free school meals.

Council leaders across Scotland have been summoned by their own umbrella organisation to an emergency meeting after more than half of the local authorities made clear they did not have the cash to pay for free school meals from August 2010.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) maintains that if individual councils do not sign up to the policy it will threaten the whole basis of the concordat thrashed out with Nationalist ministers when they won power last year.

The issue of free school meals for children in primaries one to three throughout Scotland has come to the fore after Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Education Minister, announced last week that a pilot project had been so successful it would be extended across Scotland and funded by councils from their existing budgets.

Councils of all political persuasions protested that they did not have the £50 million needed Scotland-wide to implement the policy.

That stance went to the heart of the concordat, which last year abolished ring-fencing from council budgets, allowing councils to choose their own spending priorities in return for delivering the SNP manifesto commitment of a freeze on council tax.

Individual councils now say that the concordat did not put an onus on them to deliver specific policies such as free school meals, and that with inflation and costs both rising they do not have the spare cash to pay for them in any case.

The refusal of individual councils to go along with the policy has also put them at loggerheads with their own national leadership because they maintain that the concordat is a voluntary document and not legally binding. A Scottish government spokesman last night indicated that no sanctions were available to punish any council that did not abide by it.

The council leaders have, however, been told by Cosla that they must provide free school meals as part of the concordat. Pat Watters, the Labour convener of Cosla, has written to Scotland's 32 council leaders saying that he believes the resources for this provision are included in the overall local authority settlement from the Scottish government and that agreement to the settlement was made in the full knowledge that free school meals were part of that financial provision.

He was “surprised and concerned that there appears to be a view that insufficient provision has been made for this policy or that there was no agreement by Cosla that free school meals would be provided”.

He added: “Colleagues must realise that this divergence of view strikes right to the heart of our new way

of doing business with national government. If we are seen to change

our mind after a negotiation has been completed we shouldn't be surprised

if we are seen as a less reliable partner as a consequence.”

The SNP-led Fife Council now appears to be at the centre of the dispute after Barrie Lawrie, the director of finance and resources, said that “the current budget does not include costs associated with the introduction of free school meals”.

Peter Grant, the SNP council leader and the party's candidate in the forthcoming Glenrothes by-election, has contradicted that, however, saying that the policy would be delivered.

Yesterday he was backed by a Scottish government spokesman who said that Fife had £2 million of unallocated resources for 2009-10 that would be used. “They are moving towards delivering free school meals as set out in the concordat”, he said.

A senior source at Glasgow City Council, which took part in the pilot but has refused to implement the policy, said that it was “ridiculous” for Councillor Watters to ask councils “to perform a U-turn and say the money is there and the policy is deliverable”.

At Holyrood yesterday Alex Salmond, the First Minister, insisted that the money for the policy had been provided in the funding settlement with local councils and pointed out that SNP-led councils would be providing free school meals. “The Labour Party is the only party in Scotland trying to take the meals from the mouths of Scotland's children in 2010,” he said.

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