Safety of School Buildings

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

My right hon. Friend is right to draw our attention to that matter, and I appreciate the work that his Committee has done on it. It would also be helpful if we had some clarity today from the Secretary of State about the risks that might arise when RAAC interacts with asbestos. If she could say a little bit more about that, I am sure all Members from across the House would be grateful.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am just going to make a bit more progress.

For a responsible politician, being in government is not simply a matter of pressing the agenda of their political party, their donors or those who profit from Government contracts. It is about rising to the challenges that face our country, and accepting the blame when things go wrong as the price of acclaim when they go well.

The point about RAAC was made very ably by the Secretary of State, who said:

“a school can collapse for many reasons, not just RAAC”.

They can indeed! So many things are wrong right now with our schools estate: there are faulty boilers, inadequate insulation, roofs leaking, and asbestos in around four out of five of our schools; and as the pandemic taught us, ventilation is simply not good enough in too many of our schools. How do we know that? The condition data collection tells us all of it. By the Department’s own admission, that exercise was not even a proper structural survey, despite coming 20 years after the risks of RAAC were first flagged, and seven years after the Government cancelled Labour’s school rebuilding programmes, having not even looked at hazardous materials.

The condition data collection found that more than 7,000 elements of the school estate were in poor condition and needed to be prioritised for replacement. Were all those someone else’s responsibility, too? Even the money that the Department did commit—the spending allocations of which the Minister for Schools speaks so proudly so often, with the keen pride of a Minister wholly oblivious to the scale of their own failure—was not all spent. Again, whose fault is that? Whose responsibility might that have been?

We are told that part of the difficulty in recent years has been finding the skilled labour to deliver the work that our schools so desperately need. I invite Conservative Members to reflect briefly on why exactly that might be. Could it be the dramatic overall drop in apprenticeship starts, the shortage of construction apprenticeships in recent years, or the utter failure of the Government’s apprenticeship levy to deliver spending on skills at the scale and pace we need? Could it be their wider failures on further education and in-work training? Thirteen years into a Conservative Government, who will take responsibility for that?

It was a Conservative Prime Minister who once savaged the press of this country for seeking “power without responsibility”. Today, that is the entire ideology of the whole Conservative party. That failure to accept responsibility is not merely the ethic of the Secretary of State and her Ministers; it comes right from the very top. Today’s Prime Minister was yesterday’s Chancellor, and we know—not just from the former most senior official at the Department for Education, but from the Schools Minister himself—that at the 2021 spending review, when even Ministers knew that the problems needed tackling urgently and the rate of rebuilding needed to soar, the now Prime Minister said no, and every Conservative Member accepted that. Cheaper champagne, yes; safer schools, no. There has never been a clearer picture of the priorities of the Conservative party.

The Prime Minister, fond as he is of private donations to his old school, has form on saying no to high standards in schools for other people’s children. He said no to the proper pandemic recovery plan that the Government’s own recovery tsar recommended. In 2021, he said no to the capital spend that would have kept our schools safe and our children learning. Last spring, he said no to the desperate pleas of civil servants in the Department for Education for the resources to make schools safe. In his spending review speech back in 2021, he even boasted of returning overall real-terms education spending in a few years’ time to the levels of the last Labour Government. That was not an admission, wrung as a repentant confession; it was a boast, made with pride, that one day—but perhaps not yet—he would take education as seriously as Labour.

Those who complain about party politics might reflect for just a moment on whether they would level the same accusation at the National Audit Office. In June, the NAO reported that

“Following years of underinvestment, the estate’s overall condition is declining and around 700,000 pupils are learning in a school that the responsible body or DfE believes needs major rebuilding or refurbishment. Most seriously, DfE recognises significant safety concerns across the estate, and has escalated these concerns to the government risk register.”

Just yesterday, in respect of RAAC, the Comptroller and Auditor General was clear that

“the long-term risks it posed took too long to be properly addressed”.

On the sustained inadequacy of the Government’s capital programme, he went even further:

“Failure to bite this bullet leads to poor value, with more money required for emergency measures or a sticking plaster approach.”

Failing to bite the bullet; poor value; a sticking-plaster approach—13 years into this Government, those are absolutely damning words from the Government’s own spending watchdog.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I rise as the Member of Parliament who, unfortunately, probably has more RAAC schools than any other. That does not take into account nearby secondary schools, three of which are identified on the list of cancelled projects in the Building Schools for the Future programme with RAAC in Colchester, in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), and which are all likely to be attended by pupils from my constituency.

I heave a deep sigh. Opposition day debates are about blaming the Government—I have been in opposition, and we all know that. They are not about what has fundamentally gone wrong and what lessons there are to be learned. Like the Prime Minister, as he pointed out earlier on the spending review, I can find no reference to RAAC schools in Hansard relating to any statement, urgent question or debate from 2010 when the Building Schools for the Future programme was cancelled, and cancelled it was for very good reasons. Labour’s motion is retrospectively trying to allocate blame in the past, not explaining what a Labour Government would do now or in future.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I am tempted to my feet to say that there was a properly planned programme of renewal of schools, and although RAAC in itself was not the only issue being looked at, it was part of that discussion. Just because it is not named does not mean that there was not a plan. There was a plan, and a Conservative Secretary of State axed that on day one of the coalition Government.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

That is of no comfort to my constituents, I am afraid, because nearly all the schools concerned are primary schools, and there were no primary schools in the Building Schools for the Future programme because it was a politically driven programme funded by the discredited public finance initiative, which made it extremely expensive. I do not think we should go back there.

The Labour party does not actually criticise what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State decided last week to protect the safety of schoolchildren and teachers. That was the subject of my intervention on the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson). Does she think that the Secretary of State has done the wrong thing? I will give way to her now if she would like to say that.

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am not Secretary of State.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

No, but the point is that this debate arises because the Secretary of State made a brave and courageous decision to act on the advice she was given. The Opposition has nothing whatever to say about that. She did the right thing. [Interruption.] If the shadow Secretary of State wants to intervene, by all means she may.

[Bridget Phillipson]

The hon. Gentleman would do well to show a little humility for the mess that his party has created right across our schools.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

There we have it: the hon. Lady will not say that the Secretary of State has done the wrong thing. Let the politics play itself out.

What we have here is a much more fundamental, wider systemic failure in the management of building safety, which has gone on for decades. Dr John Roberts, the former president of the Institution of Structural Engineers, wrote in The Times earlier this week:

“As a chartered structural engineer in active practice from the early 1970s, I never considered using RAAC as it did not “feel’ correct for permanent structures.”

So why was it used? One lesson is that perhaps Ministers should encourage their officials to challenge them more with uncomfortable truths—let us agree that.

The wider question is why such a critical building safety issue was systemically neglected, decade after decade. We should thank the good Lord that none of the ceilings collapsed on a classroom of pupils, or the Government would by now be announcing a full public inquiry rather like the Grenfell inquiry. There the parallels continue, because like cladding, RAAC is a long-persisting and neglected building safety risk, which successive Governments have failed to address.

I and others, including the former fire and housing Minister Nick Raynsford, the former chief investigator of the Air Accident Investigation Branch Dr Keith Conradi, and senior buildings surveyor Kevin Savage, made a submission to the Grenfell inquiry. Our recommendations to help to address the failings are principally twofold and relate to unresolved conflicts of interest in the building safety management regime of buildings, which are not addressed by the Building Safety Act 2022 or the establishment of the building safety body, which is now a statutory function of the Health and Safety Executive. At present, it is the HSE—

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

No, I will press on, if I may. At present, it is the HSE that decides how a building safety failure should be investigated, unless the Government take over with their own inquiry.

There is a need for a truly independent building safety investigation body, equivalent to the accident investigation bodies in aviation, marine, rail and offshore safety. No regulator like the HSE should also investigate safety failures, because it may find itself conflicted if part of the failure arises from a failure of regulation. That is what Lord Cullen found in the Paddington rail crash inquiry and why the Rail Accident Investigation Branch of the Department for Transport was established.

[Ian Lavery]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am sorry; I have no time.

The second conflict that needs to be resolved concerns the role of local authority building control bodies and their private sector counterparts, known as approved inspectors. The Building Safety Act will regulate the private sector approved inspectors but not local authority building control, which was not only responsible for approving the cladding on Grenfell Tower but, I hazard a guess, probably approved the building control on most of the schools built with RAAC.

The main point is that failures such as RAAC and cladding arise because of the failure of the building management safety system, which is endemic to that system. The failures also arise from the failure to find the causes of building safety incidents through a proper independent investigation body that possesses permanent, accumulated expertise that a one-off-public inquiry has to attempt to acquire from scratch.

I hope that amid the politicking, all political parties will recognise that such reforms are necessary in building safety management, or there will be more systemic failures in building safety arising from things such as the wrong cladding and the wrong concrete in the future. I have 15 seconds, if the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) would like to intervene.

[Ian Lavery]

Very briefly, does the hon. Member think that the Government’s 54% reduction in the HSE budget since 2010 is helpful in this situation?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman would raise a point relevant to my speech. There has been enough politicking about this issue. I am making more serious comments about the building safety management system of this whole country, which affects a whole lot of other public buildings as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I support the motion, which stands in the names of my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) and the Leader of the Opposition. It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey). May I just correct him by saying that PFI was started by the Conservative Major Government?

As pupils, parents and teachers were preparing for a new school term last week and this week, they were met with horrifying news that threw into question whether their schools were safe to go into. Headteachers were left scrambling around over the weekend to arrange new sites and portacabins, or, worse, telling parents that their children were not to come into school this week.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

rose—

[Ruth Cadbury]

I will not give way, as I know there are quite a few people to speak.

Schools have been rushing to book surveys to find out whether they have RAAC. This is a week when parents should be filled with joy and excitement about a new year, taking photos of their year 7s in their new uniform, not worrying about how to find holiday childcare for another week—or two weeks, who knows?

This situation did not happen by accident. Conservative Members like to pretend that the past 13 years were a fever dream, but this crisis stems primarily from the decision made in 2010 to cancel Labour’s Building Schools for the Future scheme. It was a massive and historic programme of investment. That investment would have benefited schools in my constituency and across England: schools that had RAAC; schools that have asbestos; and schools that had had little serious investment over the previous 18 years of Conservative government prior to 1997. In 2010, the Conservatives cancelled that programme because they do not know the value of investment or the role of public services, and did not care about the condition of our schools. The Prime Minister is so out of touch with the country that he struggles to use a contactless card machine. What hope do we have that he might really understand UK state schools?

When the Prime Minister was Chancellor, he made the decision to block extra funding to the Department for Education—funding that would have gone towards fixing, repairing and improving our school estate. One of the most senior civil servants in that Department even admitted that funding for school buildings was blocked because the Government wanted to push more towards free schools. For example, that involved paying £11.25 million of taxpayers’ money—way overpaying—for a former sports facility on old metropolitan open land in Osterley. Once again, the Conservative ideology trumps value for money and public safety.

We live in a country where ambulances do not turn up, the police have to be ordered to investigate crime and school buildings now face collapse. Thirteen long years of Conservative rule have utterly ruined our public services. There is no more fitting legacy than the fact that the public realm is literally collapsing in front of us. The letter I received from the DFE on Monday says that

“there is nothing more important than the safety of children, young people, and staff in education settings”.

Even if that were the view of officials within the DFE, it clearly was not the view of the Prime Minister, who was Chancellor in 2021 when the Government knew about this problem—indeed, there had been warnings long before that. If the Government really thought that there was nothing more important than the safety of children, young people and staff in education settings, why are schools collapsing and why are children being told to say at home this week?

Hon. Members have a choice today: they can vote with Labour and give parents the right to know who is responsible for this mess, or they can vote to conceal the true scale of the crisis and the Prime Minister’s failure to keep our children safe.