Business of the House

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

My hon. Friend is a member of the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, and he will know that on Tuesday morning there is a meeting between SCIPSA and IPSA—I am sorry about all these initials—where he will have an opportunity to put to the chairman of IPSA the question he has put to me. The chairman of IPSA will now have notice of what is coming and will have in his breast pocket the answer to the question, with specific details of when his board last met.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Whatever happened to the Tory announcement of the school building programme? Several months ago, the Secretary of State for Education, in an answer to me about Tibshelf school in my constituency, said that the statement would be made and that Tibshelf would almost certainly be one of the schools selected. Several months have passed and nothing has happened. Is this programme in the long grass with the equality programme, care of the elderly, building houses, the green deal, and all the rest of it?

[Sir George Young]

We intend to announce this month which schools will be rebuilt through the priority school building programme. It has been necessary to make specific checks, with site visits, on the condition of all the schools that applied, and we want to get it right. An announcement will be made shortly, and the first schools that are rebuilt through this programme will open as scheduled in 2014.