Rishi Sunak refused to properly fund a school rebuilding programme when he was chancellor, despite officials presenting evidence that there was “a critical risk to life” from crumbling concrete panels, the Department for Education’s former head civil servant has said.
After the department told Sunak’s Treasury that there was a need to rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year in England, he gave funding for only 100, which was then halved to 50, said Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary of the department from 2016 to 2020.
Conservative ministers more widely believed a greater funding priority was to build new free schools, Slater told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, as pupils returned to many schools in England for the new term.
“For me as an official, it seemed that should have been second to safety,” Slater said. “But politics is about choices. And that was a choice they made.”
Sunak and by extension conservatives in general only want to approve things that directly put money into their pockets
It would be different if he had some family/mates in the construction world he could have given the contract to for a finders fee. It’s the only reason they do anything.
Sunak doesn’t have anybody on construction I guess then… Otherwise he would have done a deal with a big friendly company for repairing all of the problems.
Either that, or he does have someone on construction and they got the contract to build all the schools, and now they want this story to go away.
Labour should be all over this, and not just Sunak. You can trace a direct line between Tory cuts over the last decade to this sort of thing. Hammer the party, not just the leader. Especially with the way things are going, half of them don’t even want him there for the GE.
Why bother when the media are doing the job for them. Labour just need to be keeping a list so they can bring all this stuff back up come election time.
No one is doing more to ensure a labour victory at the next election than the conservative party.
The thing is though, we crossed the inevitable line about 3 years ago. So now it would be nice if they could be at least be borderline competent on their way out. At the very least stop making things worse. E.g. The Online Safety Bill
Yeah as much as Sunak an objectionable character the problem is then Tories. After all Sunak wasn’t in charge when the schools were constructed and signed off on.
To be honest presumably that would be Cameron’s fault.
Given the civil service is as leaky as a sieve why is he only just timing this announcement now? 🤔
The former Head Civil Servant had safety concerns but thought keeping it quiet was the correct thing to do? He could have easily leaked this on the basis of safety. It’s not like literally every other thing was leaked during that time.
This doesn’t excuse Sunak by the way.
Maybe because no one cared about it until the media picked up on the story?
“For me as an official, it seemed that should have been second to safety” Slater said. “But politics is about choices. And that was a choice they made.”
Fair enough. Although it sounds like he was deeply concerned about safety… just not enough to raise anything to the press at the time and only now.
Because the civil service has a long tradition of service to the party in power - irrespective of which party - and a commitment to confidentiality. It takes something pretty extraordinary for that to be broken
Safety of school children not important enough?
Sorry but I think we should stop canonising the civil service. Especially when they seem to leak anything and everything they want regardless of who is currently the party of power.
I’m not canonising the civil service - and actually the number of leaks remains extraordinarily low. But sure - give em a kicking in the name of “think of the children” if you want to.
Wait, are you saying that a senior civil servant with serious concerns about the safety of schools should keep quiet out of loyalty? What?
I’m saying that at the time when the civil servant was in post, there were three budgets in play - the school maintenance budget, teacher’s pay and the ‘price per pupil’ payments made to schools. When the treasury decided to reduce the maintenance budget, it was clearly A Bad Thing but it didn’t constitute a critical concern about school safety - given the information that he had - so he didn’t break the civil service code at that poin.
When the treasury decided to reduce the maintenance budget, it was clearly A Bad Thing but it didn’t constitute a critical concern about school safety - given the information that he had
If it didn’t constitute a critical concern about safety why is everyone and their mother saying it did and putting out attack adverts saying that the former chancellor willfully put children’s lives at risk?
There was either information that it was a critical safety concern at the time and the most senior civil servant didn’t think it important enough to push a line on it (again even anonymously via a leak) or there wasn’t information about this at the time and the actions of the treasury need to be taken in that context.
I’m just not sure what the thought process here is. He (and the treasury) knew of a critical safety concern but didn’t say or try and do anything because of… what?.. a code? Oh no no no, I can’t say anything about roofs falling on children’s heads because I will break my oath to the civil service best stay quiet and not ruffle feathers. Huh?
If anyone is able to find the relevant audio of this morning’s Today programme that would be much appreciated.
It’s here at 1:12:53
There’s a larger thread on this on unitedkingdom@feddit.uk that has some more relevant material.
https://kbin.social/m/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk/t/418414/England-s-concrete-crisis-could-extend-to-hospitals-and-courts-experts
Yes and no; that thread didn’t have this morning’s revelations but it’s got more activity on it.
Hard to know which of the Uk_politics and UnitedKingdom communities is better for these kinds of discussion.
I’m subscribed to both and see both regularly.
Thanks for signposting though!
Oh, yeah, not saying “don’t discuss it here”, just that there’s a bunch of related material that already came up in discussion there; easy to make it available here by just linking to it.
At the beginning, I considered doing redirection of posts. Then I realised, it’s probably easier if people decide for themselves, with UKP for really fine grained stuff.
Like reports on north eastern quangos responsible for duck nutrition.Well let’s hope that this quango doesn’t find out that while I know loads about the nutritional value of ducks I know next to nothing about their nutritional needs.
On a more serious note, I suspect that over time these things will settle themselves as increasing numbers of users opt for different communities over time. We’re at the point now where there are more posts and comments in my subscribed communities than I can reasonably keep up with, which is a new thing (and a good thing).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak refused to properly fund a school rebuilding programme when he was chancellor, despite officials presenting evidence that there was “a critical risk to life” from crumbling concrete panels, the Department for Education’s former head civil servant has said.
Keegan insisted the DfE had taken “a very cautious approach” to the issues, and that parents should be reassured that “the vast majority of children will be going back today”.
In a damning interview on Monday morning, Slater said two surveys of Raac in schools had uncovered the extent of work needed on a building method supposed to be time-limited to about 30 years of use, with a risk in some cases of sudden and catastrophic failure beyond this.
While he was permanent secretary, in 2018, a concrete block fell from the roof of a primary school, Slater added, “so it wasn’t just a risk.
Munira Wilson, the party’s education spokesperson, said: “This bombshell revelation shows the blame for this concrete crisis lies firmly at Rishi Sunak’s door.
Speaking earlier on Sky News, Keegan said the DfE “isn’t strictly responsible for the [school] buildings”, as they are maintained by councils or academy chains, but that it would fund any work from the department’s existing budget.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s safe to say he’s refusing to fund any repairs in general.
I’m confused.
In England, these buildings are supposedly “dangerous” and near collapse, yet in Scotland the SNP are doing nothing with their buildings made of the same material.
Only one of the parties gets criticised though, naturally. Because consistency is impossible these days.
All funding has to be justified with lists on how you are going to spend it. If the Tories are not accepting buildings inspections and repairs as credible funding requests, then you will simply not get it. Councils and devolved governments can not depend on charities just providing all the help. They need cash to pay someone to do it, and the Tories are not providing that cash.
Sunak was videoed stating that as Chancellor he deliberately stopped unnecessary cash going to areas that did not deserve it. He expanded by stating he wanted to move that cash to areas who pay the most like Tunbridge Wells.
They do not get away with pointing fingers when they control the purse strings.
I’d also add a comment from another thread on the subject that I posted in:
One point I’d make from an earlier thread on the topic – it sounds like RAAC panels were used in a number of countries. It may be that the UK is particularly affected due to having quite a bit of rain – it’s moisture that does the damage.
But it may also be that the UK is being relatively-proactive. Almost all the articles I see talking about this are in the UK. I wasn’t able to find articles elsewhere saying “yeah, we looked into this, but it’s not an issue in our country because X”.
We don’t use it much in the US, but it looks like there is at least some out there, and I haven’t seen articles here saying “yeah, this is what the Brits are worried about, and we identified the buildings where it was present here and have determined that it’s not a problem”.
And use of the stuff is apparently common in mainland Europe, and I see no (English-language) news articles on it there.
So it may well be that the British response – whether it should have been faster or not – is, in fact, the response that’s actually moving the most-quickly.
I suspect partly it’s politically motivated. It’s another thing to bash the conservatives over the head with, so the opposition are bringing it up. Maybe the schools would be fine for another 10 years ago knows.
After all Labour don’t want the gain power and then this immediately comes out, better to make the Tory’s deal with it.
Hypocrisy. Where was this concern when it was only 5-6 schools a year? Care? About the serfs? Nah, just wait for the brown man. We can visit it on him, whilst we are bemoaning our Brexiting! Pip pip, and all that nonsense.
