Safety of School Buildings
Debate between Bridget Phillipson and Bernard Jenkin(8 months ago)
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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.
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.
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—