Mike Hancock News
MP secures ministerial visit to Portsmouth schools
Mike Hancock, MP (Lib Dem - Portsmouth South) has secured a commitment from the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove that either he or his deputy will visit schools in Portsmouth - probably in September and in any case before the schools capital review is concluded to see at first hand the situation in the city.
Following criticism of Building Schools for the Future by the all-party Public Accounts Select Committee in May 2009 (which included a majority of Labour MPs at the time) for poor planning, persistent over-optimism, complacency, waste of public money, lack of proof of value of money, and lack of support for schools and local authorities to achieve the educational aims of BSF, the Secretary of State for Education announced a review of the schools capital programme.
It was revealed that the schools under BSF are costing twice what they cost to build in Ireland and therefore, the Secretary of State announced a review led by John Hood, the former vice-chancellor of Oxford university, Sir John Egan, the former chief executive of BAA plc and Jaguar, Sebastian James, the group operations director of Dixons Store Group, Kevin Grace, Tesco's director of property services and Barry Quirk, the chief executive of Lewisham council "so that buildings are built on budget and on time and to ensure that a higher proportion of capital investment gets rapidly to the front line."
Mike Hancock said: "There is an urgent need for new school buildings in the city - particularly at Priory and King Richard but elsewhere as well. I am campaigning with the schools, the Portsmouth News, the City Council, pupils, parents, teachers and governors to press upon ministers the urgent need and state of dilapidation of many of our schools. It has to be said that progress under the Labour was so slow that it was calculated that it would have taken them almost 500 years to get round to every secondary school. I welcome the news that a minister will come and see at first hand the problems we face. We now need to use this opportunity to push Portsmouth's case to have its schools rebuilt and as quickly as possible."
Notes: The Report of the Public Accounts Select Committee Building Schools for the Future: renewing the secondary school estate, published 13 May 2009 can be downloaded at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubacc/274/274.pdf
Its conclusions were:
1. BSF is an important part of the Department's efforts to improve educational attainment and the life chances of children, but the Department has not explained what success looks like.
2. The Department's poor planning and persistent over-optimism has led to widespread disappointment with the programme's progress and reduced confidence in its approach and ability to include all schools by 2023.
3. The Department and Partnerships for Schools appears complacent about the challenge of renewing all secondary schools by 2023. Doing so requires:
- the doubling of the number of schools in procurement and construction;
- 8 or 9 Local Authorities to start BSF a year, and
- the construction of 250 schools a year from 2011 onwards. Current promises to increase the pace of the programme are not sufficient to meet this. The Department and Partnerships for Schools should set out a detailed plan of how it intends to increase the pace of delivery and finish the programme on time.
4. The Department and Partnerships for Schools has wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in its own skills and resources.
5. The value for money of using Local Education Partnerships (LEPs) has still to be proved.
6. Schools and local authorities are provided with little support to achieve the educational aims of BSF.
7. The Department plans that most BSF schools will be procured without competitive tendering. Although LEPs have a number of governance and contractual mechanisms to control costs, local authorities will need to rely mostly on cost comparators to assess the value for money of each project.
8. Partnerships for Schools has yet to provide local authorities with enough information to build cost comparators and compare the price of each project.
Partnerships for Schools should, as a matter of urgency, produce comprehensive cost comparators covering all costs of new and refurbished schools, including their building, maintenance, information communication technology capital and revenue,
procurement, and contract management. Doing so will allow judgements to be made on the value for money of each project and the comparison of procurement routes.
9. The remuneration arrangements for Partnerships UK cost too much and do not help the programme meet its aims. It should not be necessary to develop complex commercial agreements and pay Partnerships UK high investment returns to motivate it to provide the help and support that is central to its mission statement. The Department should pay for support it needs from Partnerships UK through a straightforward fee.
10. The Treasury has recently announced that the Government will provide debt financing of BSF private finance initiative projects where sufficient private debt financing is unavailable and the project has started procurement. For such projects, Partnerships for Schools should help local authorities to assess whether the overall sharing of risks and rewards is still appropriate.
Figures given to Parliament at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100705/debtext/100705-0002.htm#10070511000002
show that 96 schools have been rebuilt under the 13 years of the previous Labour Government - a rate of just over 7 a year. At that rate it would take approximately 500 years to rebuild the whole secondary school estate of 3,500 schools.
Under BSF, only 17.5% of the schools had been built that Labour said would have been completed by 2008 - 35 out of 200.
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