Safety of School Buildings

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gillian Keegan]

I will definitely look at that case, because that sounds as though it took place before the decision I took and also before I stood up the caseworkers, proppers, cabinets and portacabins. If the hon. Lady will give me the details of that case, I will look at it, because that should not be happening. What should be happening is exactly the same as what my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) laid out.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The Secretary of State is confident, it seems, that there are enough surveyors to do this work, but since she made this decision about schools, questions have been raised about many other public buildings and I suspect structural surveyors are now in much shorter supply. Is she still confident that structural engineers and surveyors will be available to do this work, and is she sticking to her timetable of having answers by the end of next week?

[Gillian Keegan]

I am confident that, because we started early, we have done a lot of these surveys already. Quite a lot of the schools were involved at the beginning, so I am confident of that. I am also confident that the NHS has conducted surveys of its main buildings, and I think the courts have also done surveys. However, we have now increased the number of surveying companies from three to eight to make sure that we can get through all the cases, including any that Members are concerned about, as soon as possible.

--- 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.