No, that's the symptom. The Tories are to be blamed.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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"Mr Slater also suggested that ministers preferred to spend money on opening shiny new schools with opportunities for photos in hard hats, than the more routine job of ensuring the existing stock of school buildings were up to date."
Kind of, but it's more of a symptom, not the problem.
The problem is the boomer "me first, me last", selfish and greedy mind set.
People in this country used to take pride in building infrastructure that would last well beyond their lifetimes.
Now the mentality is "what's the cheapest we can do this? I'm retiring in 30 years, so we'll build it to last 30 years, lol at the pricks who are going to have to build this properly the second time round, as long as I'm under budget and getting my end of year bonus!".
It'd be cheaper to build it properly once, than to have to relocate all the school kids and build it again every 30 years, but that'd take some real investment and a project leader with a consideration greater than "what do 'I' need?".
Raac building started in the 50s. So the silent generation. Boomers were children then. The broblems were not known till the 80s. So lack of boomer funding to maintain or replace it yes. But let's be honest gen-x on (me) were really at least equally to blame.
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.
I fail to understand how this was a negative to the Tories. They inherited a system that was funded at a higher rate than anytime in the past, and they turned that well funded enterprise into a fiasco. The phrase "Couldn't organise a P*** up in a brewery" comes to mind.
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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