Rishi Sunak halved school repairs budget despite 'risk to life' warning
Rishi Sunak slashed the budget to pay for repairs to crumbling schools when he was Chancellor, a former top official has said.
Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education from 2016 to 2020, said civil servants told the Government there was a "critical risk to life" from dodgy school buildings. In a damaging intervention, he said he was "amazed" that the Treasury failed to stump up cash in the 2021 Spending Review - when Mr Sunak was Chancellor.
The bombshell revelation puts the Prime Minister at the heart of the escalating crisis over dodgy concrete in schools, which triggered major disruption ahead of the start of term. More than 100 schools and colleges were told by the Government to fully or partially shut buildings at the eleventh hour following the recent collapse of a beam previously considered safe.
Mr Sunak said it was "completely and utterly wrong" to blame him for the crisis, adding: "One of the first things I did as Chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school re-building programme for 500 schools. Now that equates to about 50 schools a year, that will be refurbished or rebuilt." But he did not address the criticism from Mr Slater that 50 schools was half the previous year's total.
The PM said 95% of England's 22,000 schools were not affected - which means around 1,100 could have issues. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has refused to publish a full list of affected schools so far but said the details would be made public "this week".
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Mr Slater told the Today programme that officials warned the Government of a "critical risk to life" from crumbling concrete after a survey a decade ago and another commissioned in his time leading the DfE. He said around 300 to 400 schools needed to be repaired due to the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) - a lightweight concrete used until the mid-1990s.
Officials got funding to rebuild 100 schools per year but sought to double it to 200 in the 2021 Spending Review. But the-then Chancellor Mr Sunak halved it instead to just 50 schools, Mr Slater said.
Mr Slater said: "It's frustrating of course when for you the most important thing is the priority to be given to safety. If the Treasury have got a concern that there's never enough money for everything but we were able to send them really good data.
"We weren't just saying there's a significant risk of fatality, we were saying there's a critical risk to life if this programme isn't funded. While I was permanent secretary in 2018, a concrete block fell from the roof of a primary school. So it wasn't just a risk, it was actually starting to happen. So it was frustrating."
He accused the Government of focusing on opening new free schools, which was a Tory manifesto pledge. He said: "For me as an official, it seemed that it should have been second to safety but politics is about choices and that was the choice they made."
The department asked to double the number of schools being rebuilt from 100 to 200 in the 2021 Spending Review. "I thought we'd get it but the actual decision the Chancellor took in 2021 was to halve the size of the programme."
Asked who the Chancellor at the time, he said: "Rishi Sunak."
Ms Keegan insisted she was taking a "very cautious approach" after three incidents over the summer where crumbling concrete had "failed" in settings previously classified as non-critical. She told Sky News: "What happened over the summer is we had three cases - not in schools, some in schools, some not in schools - and I sent structural engineers out to see them, somewhere in commercial settings, and some in different jurisdictions.
"And when they went out to see them, they thought there'd been a failure, but it was in a non-critical setting. So that was new evidence and new information... So I decided to take a very cautious approach. And I knew it was going to be difficult because, you know, obviously, for parents, for teachers, this coming so late in August, but that's when we got the evidence that a panel had failed in a roof that had previously been classified as non-critical.. She added: "I wasn't willing to take the risk. It was just one panel, but it was in a roof that had been assessed as non-critical."
Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “The defining image of thirteen years of the Conservative-run education system will be children sat under steel girders to stop the roof falling in. Rishi Sunak bears huge culpability for his role in this debacle: he doubled down on Michael Gove’s decision to axe Labour’s schools rebuilding programme and now the chickens have come home to roost – with yet more disruption to children’s education."
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Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson Munira Wilson said: “This bombshell revelation shows the blame for this concrete crisis lies firmly at Rishi Sunak’s door. He slashed funding to repair crumbling classrooms when officials said it needed to be increased. Now children and parents across the country are paying the price for this disastrously short-sighted decision.
“The government must publish the evidence that was provided by officials at the time, and Rishi Sunak must come before Parliament today and explain why this potential threat to pupil’s safety was ignored. Families seeing their return to school ruined deserve full transparency from the prime minister about his role in this scandal.”
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