School Building Closures

Debate between Richard Burgon and Gillian Keegan

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

Last time I was at this Dispatch Box, 95% of all questionnaires had been responded to. Now it is 98.6%, so the publicity has really helped to drive people who had not already responded, and we are grateful to them. I also committed that all the schools that were waiting to be surveyed would be surveyed by the end of this week, and I can confirm that that will absolutely be done. We have a good rate of surveys; we have eight companies doing them and we now have a process that means that as soon schools come in, we will get to them very quickly to survey.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I have a straightforward question for the Secretary of State that I hope she will answer clearly. Will she guarantee that the cost of all the repairs will be funded by new money from the Government, not the current education budget, which is not enough anyway?

[Gillian Keegan]

As I think I have explained before, there are different parts to the funding. Initially, the surveying work, the mitigations work and the temporary accommodation will all be funded by the DFE’s capital budget—we have a budget for that work. There is also revenue budget for additional things such as transport, hiring a village hall and so on—that will also come from a building fund within the DFE. We have already announced some of the school rebuilding projects, but we have spaces left and some are still to be announced, so some of that will be utilised. Beyond that, as the Chancellor says, we will do everything needed to keep children safe in our schools.

Safety of School Buildings

Debate between Richard Burgon and Gillian Keegan

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Education (Gillian Keegan)]

This Government are committed to making sure that every child in this country gets a first-class education and every opportunity to make the most of their abilities. More than that, underpinning that commitment is a deeper one: to ensure that children are safe and secure in the places where they learn. I am glad that the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) has chosen to raise the issue of the safety of school buildings and investment in the school estate. Nothing is more important than the safety of children and staff in our schools, and no issue could highlight more my willingness to take the right decisions, even if they are politically difficult. The country, and the children in our schools, deserve nothing less. As I set out in the House on Monday, the Government will not shy away from that responsibility, no matter how much the Labour party descends into the political gutter.

I understand that parents, schools and this House are concerned about the issue of RAAC; we are acting responsibly and moving decisively to address it, and minimising disruption to education. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) is shouting from a sedentary position, so I will answer her question: £34 million was signed off for a Government building for the Department for Education. That was signed off by the Department’s commercial director, and was nothing to do with me. That was based on a decision made in 2019, before I was Minister. The right hon. Lady is very experienced, so I am sure that she will understand that Ministers do not sign off on Government buildings. It was the commercial director of the DFE who signed that off in 2019.

To go back to the issue in this case, because that was very misleading, we are dealing not with an issue caused in the last year, the last five years, the last decade or even the last 20 years, but with a legacy issue dating back to the 1950s. As the Chancellor set out, we will not shirk this responsibility and we will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

In Leeds, our school repair backlog is over £66 million, and the council is given £6 million a year by the Government to tackle that. The lead councillor for education, Councillor Jonathan Pryor, has written to every single Secretary of State for Education since 2018. Eight letters have been sent to raise school condition funding, but all pleas have been ignored. Does the Secretary of State really think that is acceptable?

[Gillian Keegan]

I will look at Leeds specifically, but we have awarded millions to Leeds. The biggest difference between our programme and any programme that was ever done by your Government when they were in power—

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Debate between Richard Burgon and Gillian Keegan

Monday 4th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

We have all listened carefully to what Ministers have been saying. The Prime Minister said it was “completely and utterly wrong” to blame him for failing to fully fund a programme to rebuild England’s schools when he was Chancellor. But is it not in fact the case that what was truly completely and utterly wrong, and what is completely and truly wrong, is for this Prime Minister and this Government to pursue an ideological fixation with austerity, which has caused the lives of children in this country to be put at critical risk?

[Gillian Keegan]

I can give the hon. Gentleman some good news. We are going to be funding schools more than ever before: £60 billion a year, and the overall capital budget, as I have said, is £19 billion, and that is from the spending review in 2021, of which £7 billion is allocated to 2023-24. We have been building to continue at the same building rate of new schools for a long time.