Asbestos in Schools

David Laws Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan)for securing this debate and for giving us an opportunity to discuss an extremely important and, with the publication at the end of last week of the Department’s review of policy on asbestos, timely issue. I thank him for his significant contribution as a member of the Department for Education’s asbestos in schools steering group, and for his chairmanship of the all-party group on occupational safety and health.

The asbestos in schools steering group has done invaluable work in developing the review of asbestos management in schools. I thank all its members for their insights and dedication, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who has been a doughty campaigner on the issue for many years and who has chaired the steering group. I am particularly delighted that we have been able to bring this matter to a conclusion and to publish the review before the end of her time in Parliament, given her retirement in a couple of weeks’ time. I know that she would not have forgiven me if I had failed to get the review out in time. I am pleased for her that she has had the satisfaction of seeing all her work produce a positive outcome.

As my right hon. Friend mentioned, with the general election coming up, it is important that there is cross-party support for this campaign. It is therefore appropriate that as well as hearing speeches from a Labour Member and my right hon. Friend on the Liberal Democrat Benches, we have heard from another long-standing campaigner on the issue of asbestos in my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch). I welcome her comments and pay tribute to the work that she has done to champion this issue nationally and in her constituency. There are a number of issues, even in the review that we have published, that need to be taken forward actively in the next Parliament. It is therefore important that the cross-party consensus remains and that there are Members of the House who will continue to push the matter forward with Ministers in the new Government.

I join other hon. Members in recognising the campaigning of people outside the House, including Michael Lees, who has been mentioned by everyone who has spoken. He has been a great champion outside this place for ensuring that the issue of asbestos is taken seriously.

For my Department, nothing is more important than the health and safety of children and staff while they are in our schools. The Government are absolutely committed to ensuring that those who are responsible for school buildings are equipped with the resources, information, guidance and support that they need to do their jobs effectively. I welcome this opportunity to update the House on the measures that we are taking to ensure the safety of our schools, as part of our extensive efforts to improve the condition of the school estate.

As the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North mentioned, last week we published a review of the Department for Education’s policy on the management of asbestos in schools As well as considering the available evidence, we invited stakeholders to tell us their views about the existing arrangements for managing asbestos in schools and how they thought we could help schools to manage asbestos effectively.

Based on the age of the school estate, we estimate that a majority of schools in England contain some asbestos. That is because asbestos was widely used in the construction of buildings in Britain, particularly between 1945 and 1975. The same is true of many non-school and non-education buildings that were constructed in that period, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman is aware.

If asbestos is damaged or disturbed and fibres are released, they can cause serious diseases including mesothelioma, which is a form of cancer. The hon. Gentleman explained in vivid and striking terms the effect that that dreadful illness can have on people. I am sure that the House will agree that any single case of such a disease, from any cause, is a tragedy, and that we must all do what we can to minimise the risks.

The expert scientific view, which the Department obviously has to follow, is that asbestos can be managed effectively so that it does not pose a risk. Indeed, the national regulator of asbestos management, the Health and Safety Executive, upon whose expert opinion the Government base their policy and practice, advises that provided that asbestos-containing materials remain undamaged, it is often safest to manage them in situ. The experts say that effective management is often safer than removing asbestos-containing materials, because removal can greatly increase the risk that asbestos fibres will be released into the air and there is a risk that small quantities of damaged asbestos will remain after removal.

The Government are determined to do whatever we can to ensure that all those who are responsible for the safe management of schools, whether they are local authorities, academy trusts or free school trusts—I entirely agree with the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole made about such schools—governing bodies or school staff themselves, have the information, understanding, guidance and resources that they need to keep our schools, and all those who learn and work in them, safe from any risk of harm.

That is why we updated the regulations in 2012 to ensure the safe management of asbestos. It is why we have invested £5.6 billion over the Parliament in ensuring that schools and those responsible for their buildings have the funding that they need to improve their condition, ensure the safe management of asbestos and fund its removal where that is necessary. It is one of the reasons why we have introduced multi-year allocations for maintenance: we recently announced £4.2 billion of funding over the next three years, we are reforming our approach to target more effectively areas with the most need, and we are introducing multi-year funding to give those who are responsible the certainty that they need to plan ahead and manage their buildings effectively. It is why we have established the condition improvement fund, to enable academies in small trusts and sixth-form colleges to bid for funding to help with specific maintenance projects, including asbestos management or removal. Before the end of this Parliament we expect to announce another round of allocations to academies and sixth-form colleges, which in many cases will include asbestos as part of the works to be completed.

Our Priority School Building programme is removing asbestos wherever appropriate, as part of rebuilding some of the worst school buildings in the country, and the Government have long provided information and guidance on the safe management of asbestos. We undertook to review whether we could do more to tackle barriers to the safe and effective management of asbestos in all our schools, and I am grateful to all those who contributed to the review.

[Ian Lavery]

In the past, the issue of mesothelioma has been bogged down with missing companies and insurance companies, and we cannot have the same problem for potential claims for mesothelioma in schools in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. Will the Minister clarify the position on insurance for free schools, academies, and those education centres outside local authority control?

[Mr Laws]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, that issue was not directly part of the review we published last week, so if he will allow me I will write to him before the Dissolution of Parliament to set out our thinking on those points. If he wants to make further representation on that issue directly to the Department—notwithstanding that we have only a short period before end of this Parliament—I would be pleased to receive it.

I pay tribute to the all-party occupational safety and health group, the committee on carcinogenicity, and members of our Department’s asbestos in schools steering group. I am grateful to all those who submitted evidence to the review, and to the many Members of the House who have taken a keen interest in this issue. I pay tribute to our excellent officials in the Department for Education. They have liaised directly with hon. Members on this matter, advised Ministers, and done all the really hard work on the review and the detail of the proposals.

The review that we published last week sets out actions in the following four areas that the Government are taking forward to build on our current approach. First, a key task is to ensure that all those who have a role to play are aware of their responsibilities and understand what they need to do to manage asbestos safely. We will soon publish new, more user-friendly guidance on asbestos management in schools, and we will work with our partners to ensure that it is widely disseminated. There can be no excuse for any person with responsibility for a school building not to know how to manage asbestos safely.

Secondly—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole said earlier, this is one of the most important conclusions in the review—as well as providing more guidance and support to those with responsibility for asbestos management, we must also ensure that they are held accountable and are doing their job effectively. Evidence from Health and Safety Executive inspection initiatives has demonstrated that although the majority of duty holders for schools manage their asbestos in compliance with the law, there is room for improvement. For example, an inspection initiative in schools outside local authority control during 2013-14 found that 13% of schools were not compliant with regulations and had to be served with improvement notices. Previous inspection initiatives produced similar results for other schools. In 2010-11, 17% of the schools inspected were served with improvement notices, and in 2009-10, 10% of local authorities inspected were served with improvement notices. None of the duty holders in that area should therefore have any level of complacency.

The inspection initiatives highlighted a number of common issues. Some schools were found to have no written asbestos management plan, or had documentation that had been allowed to go out of date. Other common faults were a lack of asbestos training for in-house staff likely to disturb asbestos, and poor communication with contractors and other visitors about where asbestos was located.

To tackle those issues, our review proposes new measures to increase the transparency of asbestos management and the scrutiny of those responsible for it. We are now consulting on the best way to collect information from schools on how they manage their asbestos. We propose to ask those responsible for asbestos management in schools to confirm that their schools have an up-to-date management plan. We also plan to ask them if they are carrying out regular management activities, such as implementing procedures to prevent the disturbance of asbestos and communicating with staff and visitors about the presence of asbestos in a school. Once the Department holds this information, it will be able to take appropriate action to ensure that cases of inadequate management are addressed. This will be a significant step towards improving awareness and compliance, and ensuring that the proper management of asbestos is a priority in all schools that contain it.

I underline that this is ongoing work and we will be consulting. Inevitably, that consultation will run into the period of the next Government. The next Government will therefore also have to take some key decisions, which is why momentum is very important. In response to the specific question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole, I underline that our expectations will be on all duty holders, whether local authorities, individuals schools or chains, to ensure that they are doing that job properly, and we will want to be satisfied that that is the case.

Thirdly, we want to improve the evidence base on the risks posed by asbestos in schools. The review highlights the lack of contemporary evidence about the levels of asbestos fibres present in schools. This is due partly to the limitations of existing techniques for sampling asbestos fibres in the air, but if we can design a reliable study it would be a significant step forward in our understanding of the risks and therefore how best to minimise them. We are working actively with the Health and Safety Executive to establish the feasibility and optimal design of a major new study into the background level of asbestos fibres in schools, and we expect the study to begin by 2016.

Finally, we will continue to invest in the school estate in a way that ensures asbestos can be dealt with adequately, so that over time and where appropriate we see a reduction in the number of school buildings with asbestos-containing materials. In the course of this Parliament, the Government are spending a total of nearly £18 billion on school buildings and new school places. On top of that, in February 2015 we announced a further £6.2 billion of funding to maintain and improve the condition of the school estate going into the next Parliament. Our extensive capital investment programme is targeted at those schools in the worst condition. Where appropriate, we reflect the risks posed by asbestos when making funding decisions. We give local decision makers the funding they need to prioritise asbestos-related works. By improving the condition of the school buildings in the worst condition, our capital programmes will reduce the presence of asbestos in the estate and the risks posed by the remaining asbestos.

The first phase of our Priority School Building programme is rebuilding or addressing the condition need of 261 schools in the worst state of repair. The vast majority of these schools are being rebuilt and so will have any asbestos removed when the existing buildings are demolished. The second phase of the Priority School Building programme, which we announced recently, will address condition need in a further 277 schools. We primarily used information from the property data survey to assess the scale and severity of condition need. However, we also gave applicants the opportunity to identify significant issues that would not have been identified through the property data survey, for example where the costs of safely managing asbestos are excessive and are of such significance as to affect the integrity of the building. All applications that stated that their school has a significant asbestos-related issue and provided relevant supporting documentation, were assessed by independent technical advisers. We took this assessment into account when prioritising the blocks to be included in the programme. All successful blocks within Priority School Building programme 2 will have asbestos issues dealt with appropriately, whether they were raised as a specific concern in the application process or not, because we might discover some of these issues when we go on-site.

We also directly fund the maintenance and improvement of academies and sixth-form colleges through the academies capital maintenance fund and the building condition improvement fund for sixth-form colleges, which are now being combined into the new condition improvement fund. A number of these schemes involve the removal of asbestos—for example, where an academy is replacing its boilers and pipework—and we also allow academies and sixth-form colleges to bid to this fund where they have significant asbestos that is proving difficult to manage.

Asbestos can be managed effectively—and is being managed effectively in the vast majority of schools. The review we published last week is just the latest step in these ongoing efforts. Working together, we can ensure that asbestos is managed effectively in all schools and over time in a safe and an evidence-based way. As the school estate is modernised and replaced, asbestos will be removed from school buildings.

I welcome today’s debate and the contributions from all hon. Members who have participated. Through our school building programme and the measures announced in the review, I hope that we will ensure that the schools estate is a safe environment for all pupils and teachers.

Question put and agreed to.