Safety of School Buildings

Bridget Phillipson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty, that he will be graciously pleased to give directions that there will be laid before this House by 13 September 2023 the following papers –

(a) submissions from the Department for Education to HM Treasury related to the spending reviews in 2020 and 2021; and

(b) all papers, advice, and correspondence, including submissions and electronic communications (including communications with and from Ministers and Special Advisers) within and between the Cabinet Office (including the Office of the Prime Minister), the Department for Education and HM Treasury relating to these submissions concerned with school buildings.

Today we seek the release of papers that would tell us what has and what has not been happening in our schools—papers that the Government refused again yesterday to release and about which the Prime Minister again evaded questions today. However, this debate is about much more than just the documents. It is about more than reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. It is about more than school buildings and their safety. This debate quite simply is about responsibility, and whether the Prime Minister will come clean about the allegation that he knew the risks, that he was warned, that he was told.

That is the issue in the motion before the House today: whether the Prime Minister was told that urgent action was needed to secure the safety of schools, but instead he slashed the cost of champagne; whether he will accept responsibility for his choices and whether he will be clear where responsibility lies. All of us are here with deep responsibilities to our constituents, to be open, to be honest, to take decisions objectively and selflessly, to accept accountability, to have integrity and to show leadership.

Let me be clear right from the outset that a Labour Government would have shown leadership on this, not just in the last few weeks but for years on end. That was our record in government. A Labour Secretary of State, faced today with a sudden crisis such as this, would have got those lists of the affected schools out quickly, would have been straight back to London, would have been communicating every day to parents and above all to children, would be taking steps not just to mitigate the immediate challenges around safety—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. She is not giving way. Perhaps she will give way later.

[Bridget Phillipson]

We would remember the lesson from the pandemic that every school day matters. We would be ensuring the continuity of education for every child in school. We would be ensuring in-person learning for all our children. We would be doing that right now, and we would not be looking for plaudits, blaming others, or demanding praise. We would accept responsibility for what had gone wrong on our watch, and we would take responsibility for fixing it—fixing it fast, fixing it to last and fixing it for good.

The Government cannot even fix sending out their suggested interventions for today’s debate to the right set of Back-Benchers. It is hardly a surprise that they cannot fix the chaos in our schools. Here we are today, because of the utter shambles that has accompanied the start of a new school year for so many children. The public realm is literally crumbling around the next generation. The defining image of 13 years of Conservative Government is children cowering under steel props to stop the ceiling literally falling in on their heads.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is it not always the case that when the Conservatives are in power, our schools crumble? In 1997 one in five schools were inadequate and needed to be rebuilt by a Labour Government. Because the Conservatives slashed the rebuilding programme, under this Government we are in the same dire situation again, and the only party that can fix it is a Labour party in government.

[Bridget Phillipson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Like him, I remember the transformation that that Labour Government delivered. I will come to that in more detail during the debate.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

The Welsh Labour Government have complained that the briefing they received lacked the technical detail required to take forward the work on schools. Does the hon. Lady agree that the Secretary of State should provide the other Governments with full details from the working group when they become available?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I know that Conservative Members have a keen fascination with all things going on in Wales at the moment, and that Ministers have not always been in full possession of the facts at the Dispatch Box, so I will put a few on the record so that we can all be clear about the situation in Wales. In Wales, school capital funding has increased by around 122% in cash terms, and 23% in real terms, between 2014-15 and 2023-24. Perhaps we can use that as the basis for slightly more informed debate during today’s discussions.

Today, our first priority must be safety—as it must always be. Guaranteeing that safety must ultimately be the responsibility of Ministers and of Government. That is why I repeatedly pressed the Secretary of State to publish a full list of all the schools with concerns about RAAC, which she has at last published today. However, I gently note that there could be omissions on that list, a number of which have already been drawn to my attention. I hope that we can get full clarity about the situation across our schools.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

The hon. Lady has made a whole series of allegations and challenges about the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, but surely, in a devolved arrangement, all those responsibilities and challenges apply equally to the First Minister. She has recognised that the list of schools in England has been published; why has such a list not been published for Wales? Does she accept that that is an example of the Welsh Government failing education and schools in Wales?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The difference between the Labour Government in Wales and the Government here in Westminster is that, over the last 13 years, the Welsh Government have continued with a school rebuilding programme, unlike the UK Government, who have cut funding and cut support to our schools time and again.

We want to be clear, open and honest with local authorities and multi-academy trusts about the steps that the Secretary of State is taking to get in place the protections and mitigations that are needed. She said on Monday:

“Absolutely nothing is more important than the safety of children and staff. It has always been the case that where we are made aware of a building that poses an immediate risk, we have taken immediate action.”—[Official Report, 4 September 2023; Vol. 737, c. 52.]

Yet she was keen to spread the responsibility for the concrete crisis through time and space, including to her colleagues, who I understand had been sitting on their backsides; to the Welsh Government—a topic of interest for Members—whose ability to act swiftly has been hampered by key information not being shared; and to the last Labour Government, who left office 13 years ago.

The Secretary of State was keen to emphasise that it was not her Department’s responsibility, or hers, to ensure the safety of our children at school. Pushing responsibility on to others—local authorities, the schools themselves, multi-academy trusts—without the powers, resources or support they need, is very simply passing the buck, and my word, there has been an awful lot of that this week.

As Ministers have been keen to remind us, concerns were first raised about RAAC back in the 1990s. By then, the wider issue was that too many schools, built quickly and cheaply in the previous 50 years, were approaching the end of their design life. The issues were many: RAAC, asbestos and the simple reality—in the school I went to and in so many other state schools across our the country—of buckets in corridors, classrooms blackened by mould, windows that did not close and doors that would not shut.

I was at school back in the mid ’90s, but I know how serious Labour politicians took those warnings, and I am proud that as the scale of the challenge became clear, Labour Ministers rose to it. In 2004, the Buildings Schools for the Future programme was launched to rebuild every secondary school in our country over 15 years. In 2007, Building Schools for the Future was joined by the primary capital programme to give every child the chance to learn safely in a first-rate learning environment. That was done not because it was simple or quick, nor because there were no easier, more popular or more eye-catching choices, but because it was right, because it was responsible, and because that Labour Government believed then, as we do now, that excellence must be for everyone, and that every child deserves the best start—not just some children, but all our children.

The change we saw in 2010, when the Conservatives entered Government, reflected a very different approach: an entirely botched cancellation of existing programmes not by Ministers long since retired, but by the Minister for Schools, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), who is still sitting on the Treasury Bench today, and by a former Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who is still in the Cabinet. Ambitions were reduced and timelines extended. Ministers knew the consequences when they took those decisions. They banked the savings and left our schools to rot slowly, quietly and inexorably.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend not think that the vast, overinflated amounts of money spent on some free school sites could have been better spent dealing with the collapsing schools?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for all the work that she has done over many years, as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, to draw our attention to the problems. I will say a bit more about the recent report by the National Audit Office on many of these issues.

When we leave risks unattended, they worsen and, in time, things start to fail—first quickly, then suddenly. In July 2018, a ceiling suddenly collapsed at Singlewell Primary School in Kent, where RAAC failed without warning. Mercifully, no one was hurt. Months passed, and an alert from central Government and the Local Government Association went out that autumn emphasising the risks. It said:

“The limited durability of RAAC roofs and other RAAC structures has long been recognised; however recent experience (which includes two roof failures with little or no warning) suggests the problem may be more serious than previously appreciated and that many building owners are not aware that it is present in their property.”

Let me emphasise that final point: many building owners are not aware.

A few months after that, in May 2019, the Standing Committee on Structural Safety issued a note on the failure of RAAC planks. It said that all those installed before 1980

“are now past their expected service life and it is recommended that consideration is given to their replacement.”

It was not until March 2022—almost four years after that ceiling collapsed—that the Department for Education responded to the challenge of RAAC. How? It sent out a survey—not a surveyor, not a team of surveyors, and not even funding for surveyors, but a survey. If the issue was such a priority, and if the Secretary of State and her Department believed in immediate action, why, after a school collapsed in July 2018, did it take almost four years for the Department to send out a survey about RAAC in March 2022? I appreciate that the Secretary of State was not in post throughout that time, but responsibility in Government is not merely individual; crucially, it is collective and enduring. It stretches across Government and down the years. If she does not understand that point, perhaps she could seek advice from the Schools Minister, who has been in post for so many years, as he is today.

[Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)]

The key fact is that the Welsh Government ordered surveys only in May 2023, while the UK Government started engaging with schools in 2022. Surely that shows a woeful lack of responsibility.

[Bridget Phillipson]

I have here a briefing document. It would save us all a bit of time and energy if Conservative Members just gave us the number and let us deal with it. The Welsh Labour Government have been taking consistent action to rebuild schools during their time in office; the hon. Gentleman might not like it, but it is a fact, and that stands in stark contrast to what has been happening here in England.

[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. The Work and Pensions Committee highlighted last year the growing number of retired schoolteachers succumbing to mesothelioma because of exposure to asbestos during their working life. At the current rate of progress, it will take 350 years to remove all the asbestos from schools. Does she agree that the Department must get a move on with that?

[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.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware that Jonathan Slater, the former permanent secretary, said that civil servants told the Government that there was a “critical risk to life” because of the dodgy buildings, and the failure to follow advice and invest in making sure our schools are safe. Does she agree that this Government are seriously putting children’s lives at risk through their incompetence and negligence, and through the failure of the Prime Minister to make sure there is proper investment in our schools?

[Bridget Phillipson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If Ministers are confident about everything they have done and the decisions that were taken, they will back our motion today, allow us to see the papers, and be transparent with this House.

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I should be shocked by the lack of humility from Conservative Front Benchers, but sadly, I am not. Schools are literally collapsing around us, and the Conservatives want people to thank them for it. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Education Secretary needs to get a grip and explain why her offices got a £34 million refurbishment while schools are crumbling under this Tory Government?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a very important point.

Finally, let me turn to the wording of the motion. I know that many Conservative Members share Labour’s concerns, and I ask them today to think of the young people and the school staff in their constituency. However loyal they have been in every past debate, I ask them to help us put truth and transparency first, and to force responsibility on their Front Benchers. It is time for the full truth to come out about why our schools are unsafe today, and whose decision that was. It is time at last for Ministers, and the Prime Minister in particular, to take and accept responsibility for the broken country they will leave behind. I commend the motion to the House.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[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—