Building Schools for the Future
Debate between Andy Slaughter and Iain Wright(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) on securing this timely and hugely important debate. He has campaigned tenaciously on this issue on behalf of the schools in his constituency and I applaud him for it.
This has been an energetic and passionate debate, and rightly so. Education fires up people’s passions. Many hon. Members from various parties were drawn into politics because they want to work to give all our children and young people the best possible start—an aim with which I think we all agree. However, the whole House should also agree that cutting Building Schools for the Future so soon after the birth of the coalition Government is a shameful and shambolic example of ministerial arrogance and incompetence.
Time and time again in this debate, we have heard of the anger in hon. Members’ constituencies—real anger, not synthetic—about the decision to scrap school buildings. My hon. Friend the Member for Halton, my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) have made excellent speeches. I also highlight the excellent contribution made by the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who illustrated the cross-party anger about the matter. The rally in London on Monday organised by the teaching unions and my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Education showed the depth of anger not just in the House, but across the country among parents, young people, teachers, school governors and local authorities.
We have heard that the manner in which the decision was made showed breathtaking incompetence and arrogance. It was incompetent because the Secretary of State, whom I like very much and think is an incredibly intelligent man, was not on top of his brief. It was a debacle because information was not provided to hon. Members when the Secretary of State made his statement to the House on 5 July. It was a shambles because error after error appeared in the cancellation lists. I think that we are currently on our fifth or sixth list, but I might be a bit behind the curve.
What matters more than any of that is the fact that 735 schools will now not be refurbished or rebuilt as planned. It is confusing. Dyke House school in my constituency was due for financial closure this Friday. It has decanted all its students to another site ahead of the two-year building programme. The head teacher has invested another £400,000 to facilitate the build, and the local authority has invested £3 million to ensure that it takes place. There has been no word whatever about whether the project can proceed. I asked a named day question about Dyke House school on 6 July, to be answered on 12 July. Almost two weeks after that answer was due to be provided, I have not yet got a response from the Department. I had the privilege to serve as a Minister in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and I found it an incredible honour to work with the most passionate, energetic and professional officials anywhere in Whitehall. This is not the officials’ fault; it is a symptom and a sign of ministerial dysfunction and incompetence, and the ministerial team should be ashamed of themselves.
Mr Slaughter
My hon. Friend is identifying some of the perhaps unintended consequences. It is not just that schools are being left with crumbling buildings; local authorities’ plans for redeveloping schools have also been thrown into chaos, causing not only financial loss but the sort of loss that my hon. Friend is discussing. In some local authorities, including mine, academies have had a full modernisation programme but other schools have been left to rot, resulting in a two-tier system. It is a complete shambles.