School Building Closures

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I do not recall making any particularly party political broadcasts. On the day when we made the announcements, I did the evening round and the pooled clip and recording, and the Minister for Schools, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), then did the morning round. That was the focus of our attention in terms of publicity.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The National Audit Office report of 28 June was, of course, agreed with the Department, as all NAO reports are. Given that that report identified that up to 700,000 children were in schools where there were critical safety issues, what was the technical evidence that the Secretary of State said she required some two months later, when that final school collapsed in the way it did?

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that very good question. The NAO report addressed bids to, and demand for, the school rebuilding programme. On the technical information, what we have done during the surveys—[Interruption.] If he cares to listen, there is an important distinction. The surveys that we started conducting from September 2022, when we sent our own surveyors into schools, looked at RAAC and whether it was critical or non-critical. That is why 52 schools had already been closed immediately: they were seen as critical. What changed was that there were three instances where the ceilings had been assessed as non-critical but had failed. I wanted structural engineers—I am not a structural engineer—to go in and tell me whether something assessed as non-critical had failed for another reason. Could they say why it had failed, or did I need to look at every non-critical roof and change my understanding of how we wanted to treat them? I wanted to be cautious. That was what we did, and as a result, we decided to act on all the non-critical ceilings straight away to keep people safe.