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Are spending cuts to blame for the schools concrete crisis? (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"The Conservatives inherited just under £10bn a year in education capital sending in 2010, and have spent £5-6bn a year since then, in real terms. Part of those savings came from scrapping the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project in 2010, which aimed to rebuild and refurbish every secondary school in England."

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The chancellor said on Sunday that "one of his first decisions" while he was trying to shore up the public finances last year was to protect cash spending on capital, in other words maintain it at current levels.

Indeed, this planned £4bn fall in education spending was the biggest single departmental contributor to the Coalition's austerity savings in the overall capital budget from 2010 to 2015.

That document claimed "the decision to end BSF will allow new capital to be focused on meeting demographic pressures and addressing maintenance needs".

On the BBC's Today programme on Monday, former top education civil servant Jonathan Slater said the government cut the schools' repair budget in 2021 despite a warning of a "critical risk to life" from crumbling concrete.

In 2019, the Office of Government Property calculated that in order to bring the schools estate to best practice, partly because of the concrete issue, £7bn a year in funding was required.

But in recent years, self-imposed limits on government debt levels have directly affected capital spending decisions for the long term.

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