Specialist formulas are available on the NHS to help those with children who need to have specialist diets. My DD could have formula prescribed for her due to her cows milk protein allergy. But we found it easier simply to continue breastfeeding but with me being dairy-free.
My brother was prescribed Wysoy as a baby due to a similar suite of allergies. It was less well-known back then that avoidance by the breastfeeding might of the allergens means that the child need not be weaned from the breast. In my mum the inability to breastfeed her third child despite having successfully fed her first two, through no physical problem, caused massive PND and various other issues. It wasn't a lifestyle choice not to breastfeed, it was simply a need to keep her son alive.
The use of specialist formula is medically indicated in these sort of cases.
Personally, I think that where breastfeeding is physically not possible (for actual medical reasons) or for cases such as my brother (multiple allergies, confirmed by medical diagnosis) then formula should be freely available on the NHS. Enriched products are needed because the child does not have access to cheese, yogurts and milk that are considered essential for growth. Commercial milk substitutes simply don't have the range of nutrients added to them, so allergic children need formula long past where normal children have switched to cows milk.
We haven't found that a specialist diet is particularly more expensive than a normal diet, but I'm a fan if hone-baking and making my own where ever I can, which saves us a lot of money. We've also been lucky enough that DD can tolerate goats milk, so I can use that a lot if the time.
I'm not talking about the posters who, for not medical reasons cannot feed their children, but fir those who choose to formula feed without even trying to feed in the normal manner, why should I pay to subsidise them? My neighbour is pregnant, her child will never be put on the breast, she refuses to even try.
This is the legacy of formula companies. They have, through many years of advertising campaigns convinced us its abnormal to feed our children in the manner nature intended and they continue to even today. Listen carefully to those adverts for 'follow-on milk' a substance our children don't even need. "breastfeeding is best fir your baby, but if you choose to move on,brand x provides everything your growing child needs", the continued pedalling if the widely discredited 'iron deficiency' myth, leading you to believe that a weaned child can only gets irs daily iron needs from milk(?) really, it doesn't eat meat or leafy green veg at all?
The advertising budget of these companies is something like £23 per child........ that money has to come from somewhere, and the companies needed to perpetuate the myth that effectively, while breast is best, formula is normal.