Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I assure my hon. Friend that it is already below that number because we have been surveying every day. We have now contracted eight building surveying companies—we had three; we now have eight—to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to do that as quickly as possible. We will do a survey for all the ones that are suspected to have RAAC—as I said, most of them will probably not go on to be confirmed to have it—and we hope to get through them all in the next couple of weeks.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

As one of the Ministers who came into the DFE back in 2010, we found that, contrary to some of the claims made by those on the Opposition Front Bench, Building Schools for the Future was hugely expensive, hugely bureaucratic, involving elaborate quangos, with most of the money being spent before a single brick had been laid, and mostly built with private finance initiative funding, saddling schools with interest payments for 30 years. How many of these schools may have been PFI-funded, and who will pick up the remedial work bill for them?

[Gillian Keegan]

My hon. Friend reminds us all of the other legacy of the Building Schools for the Future programme: the PFIs that probably they are still paying for today. The Department has taken a different approach and has reduced costs by simplifying the design and construction, with more standardisation of design, and finding economies of scale by offering central procurement, and we have reduced the cost significantly of each school. On PFI, I will have get back to him, because I do not know how many of these, if any, have any remaining PFI—certainly not under our watch.