By John Pickard, Brentwood and Ongar Labour member
One of the first things the Tory-LibDem coalition did when they were elected in May 2010, was to cancel the previous Labour government’s programme of school building. Michael Gove had been Education Minister only for a few weeks before this multi-billion project was scrapped. More than seven hundred schools that were due for a substantial revamp were suddenly left with nothing.
At the time, I worked as an Education Adviser for the Labour government’s programme – called Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – in the London Borough of Newham. BSF in Newham meant two secondary schools were completely rebuilt and anything between £6m and £10m invested in refurbishment and buildings in all the other secondaries in the borough. Some would get new sports halls, some a new science block, for example, but all of them had major revamps.
In July, only weeks after the election, I was in a meeting with senior teachers at the Plashet Girls’ School in East Ham, discussing how ‘their’ millions could be spent, when someone came in and announced that the whole thing was scrapped. The meeting was a waste of time. The anger and disappointment around that room was palpable.
The legacy of Gove’s decision is apparent today, in the crisis in school of buildings and the revelation that the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (raac) used in many schools presents a danger of collapse. Hundreds of schools have been forced to close and thousands of pupils are once again having their education disrupted.
Government warned five years ago about raac concrete
The danger of raac has been known for a long time. It was always acknowledged by structural engineers to be a material with a limited life and five years ago the Local Government Association warned the government about the risk and noting that many schools and other buildings were coming to the end of their safe life.
This warning has bounced around government departments since then, but nothing was ever done. As they have done with all public infrastructure since they came to office, the Tories have preferred to throw money at their friends rather than invest in services.
Schools have been reduced to ‘bidding’ for money from their local authorities…schools like the Anglo-European, in Brentwood, near me, which unsuccessfully ‘bid’ for cash from Essex County Council for five years. Finally, during the February half-term holiday this year, the Sixth Form block was declared unsafe and entry forbidden for staff and students. It took until June before temporary classrooms were provided to make up the loss. The visit of Education Minister Gillian Keegan to the school last week in no way makes up for her neglect of the students’ education beforehand.
What has happened in this school has now been multiplied in over a hundred other schools across the country. Not surprisingly, teachers’ unions are appalled. “It is absolutely disgraceful,” the NEU general secretary, Daniel Kebede told the BBC, “and a sign of gross government incompetence, that a few days before the start of term, 104 schools are finding out that some or all of their buildings are unsafe and cannot be used.” A spokesperson for the Association of School and College Leaders condemned the government’s “scramble” over raac and noted that it had “failed to invest sufficiently in the school estate“.
BSF was a £45bn building programme
According to the Financial Times (September 7), those hundred-plus schools currently closed are just the tip of the iceberg. “According to a National Audit Office report in June, the DfE had identified 572 schools with a potential Raac problem, a legacy of England’s particular education policy history”.
Labour’s BSF school-building programme was far from perfect. It was arranged as an ‘off the books’ exercise, as a ‘public-private partnership’ (logo top), effectively a variant PFI scheme. In Newham, where I worked, it meant that one building contractor – Laing O’Rourke – did all of the building work and two other companies – RM and Mitie – were responsible, respectively, for all of the IT investment and facilities management.
Because it was a PFI-based scheme, the initial capital investment in Newham secondary schools was around £63m, but over the 25-year life of the PFI project, payments amounted to over £190m, so it was much the same scam as we have seen fleecing the NHS on a massive scale.
The same would have been true in all the other local authorities with BSF investments. Although BSF was kept ‘off the books’ in terms of apparent public expenditure, the eventual cost to the taxpayer was actually far higher than it would have been if the government had just given local authorities the money for building schools themselves. PFI, as in the NHS, is like having a 25-year mortgage on a house, but with a extortionately high interest rate.
But on the other hand, despite this major drawback, BSF at least did mean there was some investment going into schools. Over the fifteen years of the planned programme, £45bn was committed to it. The funds were allocated to local authorities on the basis that half of its secondary school ‘floor area’ would be based on completely new-built facilities. Of the remainder, 35% was to be ‘remodelled’ and 15% ‘refurbished’. Overall, it was hugely beneficial to authorities involved and eventually, in a phased programme of rolling out ‘waves’, all local authorities were to be included.
As an active participant in the programme, I could also see that there was huge scope for innovation and originality in school design and teaching facitilies. Information Technology – with investment in computers and other hardware – had to have an obligatory 10%, of every local authority’s BSF investment, so IT was a prominent feature in all school and classroom designs.
Labour needs a building programme for schools…and other things
Although BSF was a programme aimed at secondary schools, an equivalent programme for primary school building began to be rolled out before the Tories stopped the whole thing dead.
Ironically, Michael Gove admitted six years later, in 2016, that the cancellation had been a “mistake”. “Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday (27 November), he said that his handling of the issue had been one of his worst mistakes in politics” (The Architects Journal, November 2016). Gove’s Mea Culpa didn’t stop him keeping his mouth shut and supporting the same government’s austerity for another seven years, most of that time as a minister.
This new school fiasco is only one more nail in the coffin for a government universally derided and despised. But other than condemning the Tories for their incompetence over the schools issue – which is true – the Labour leadership have been notably silent on an alternative policy. As is known, the problem of raac concrete is one affecting hundreds of public buildings, including schools, hospitals and other government departments.
If Labour is to offer a meaningful difference in the way it deals with public investment and the infrastructure upon which we all depend, then it needs to put forward a policy of large-scale investment in public buildings. It is something that should be at least on the same scale as the former BSF programme, but without the bias towards corporate profiteering.
One of the most serious problems facing an incoming Labour government is not directly concerned with Education – it is the chronic shortage of affordable housing for young people in particular. The whole situation is crying out for a socialist policy for building – for something like a publicly owned National Building Corporation, to work with Local Authority Direct Labour departments to build council housing, hospitals and medical facilities and, not least, schools.
An incoming Labour government should cancel all further PFI payments – many of which are due to continue for years – and use the money saved to finance local authorities to build new safe, modern schools that are fit for the twenty-first century.
