Safety of School Buildings

Gillian Keegan Excerpts

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—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I think the Secretary of State means “his Government”.

[Gillian Keegan]

I am sorry. Unlike the hon. Gentleman’s Government when they were in power, we actually did a conditions survey. We have done two conditions surveys and we have done a full RAAC survey, which we are now finishing with the responses that are coming in. We know the conditions; previously, the Labour Government did not know anything about the conditions and no decisions were made based on the condition of schools.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

St Francis’ primary school in my constituency identified RAAC problems way back in 2019. It had to fund its own survey to do that. Since 2019, St Francis’ has submitted two bids to make its roof safe, and both were rejected. They appealed both times, and both appeals were rejected. Can I ask the Secretary of State how she can justify the rejection of those bids, and how can she justify the potentially much higher costs that must now be paid from the public purse to make St Francis’ safe?

[Gillian Keegan]

The hon. Lady raises a good point, because of course the responsible body, St Francis’, has done the right thing by doing its survey. That is what everybody was asked to do in 2019 and in 2018, and in guidance since then. There are conditions and condition-based requests, and if the school wants to get in touch and give us the details, I am very happy to look at that case. I am very serious about making sure that we get rid of RAAC in our schools.

The school estate consists of over 22,000 schools and sixth-form colleges, with over 64,000 blocks. Of course, the condition varies across the estate, and a number of buildings are reaching the end of their useful life. That is why we have a 10-year rebuilding programme, and why the spending reviews in 2020 and 2021 allocated more than £7 billion for maintenance allocations for schools on top of that programme.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Gillian Keegan]

I should make a bit of progress, because I do have an awful lot of this in the speech. I really do want to satisfy people with detailed information because I have a lot of it.

Although local authorities, academy trusts and other bodies are directly responsible for school buildings, we support them by allocating significant capital funding each year, delivering major rebuilding programmes and providing guidance on effective estate management. Responsible bodies’ local knowledge of their estates and their work to maintain their estates make them much better placed to ensure that school and college buildings are kept safe, compliant with regulations and in good working order. However, the Department always stands ready to provide additional support on a case-by-case basis if we are alerted to a safety issue by those responsible bodies. This is the normal pattern of maintenance—a careful and calibrated local response.

However, we judged in this case that the issue of RAAC required us to take a much more proactive and direct approach. This approach is unprecedented across the UK, where England is leading. Sensing the scale of the potential challenge, we improved our surveying so that we had the capacity to act, even if we did not need to do so. Our condition data collection, which ran from 2017 to 2019, visited nearly all 22,000 schools and sixth-form colleges, and is one of the largest data collections of its kind. It helps us to understand what is needed in schools and to target our efforts in the way that best meets needs. In contrast, over the 13 years of the last Labour Government, there was not a single comprehensive review of the school estate. Yes, that is right: they were simply in the dark. Individual reports from the condition data collection—

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

I will make a bit of progress, but I am not ignoring Members and I will take other interventions.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

I will make a bit of progress, and then I will come back to both hon. Members.

As we became aware of the specific issues with RAAC, we supplemented the data collection with more targeted surveys especially for RAAC. That was done so that when we made decisions, we would be able to act. I will leave colleagues to draw their own conclusions from the fact that Labour-run Wales is now playing catch-up to identify where RAAC is in its school estate. On the question from the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), we briefed Wales verbally on new technical guidance on 1 September and we shared visual information on three cases over the weekend.

[Richard Graham]

None of us should be here to criticise the scrutiny of safety in schools, so can I thank the Department for dispatching fast, as requested, two surveyors to look at the one school in my constituency of Gloucester that is potentially affected? I also thank them for completing their mission fast, so that the head could today confirm to his teachers, parents and pupils alike that there is no RAAC in the school whatsoever.

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend, and he is absolutely right. That is what we are doing with any work. We are being ultra-cautious here. The decision I have made is ultra-cautious, and first of all it is to make sure that we survey all schools as quickly as possible.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

By the same volition, a school in my constituency sent in the results of the survey on 14 July and was promised by the Department that it would be contacted on Friday or Monday with the report, but it has heard from no one and it was given a telephone number that gets it through to the wrong department. We now have children out of school as a precautionary measure, which is surely unacceptable. Will the Secretary of State look at this case, but will she also say how many other schools are in this position?

[Gillian Keegan]

I will definitely look at that case, because that sounds as though it took place before the decision I took and also before I stood up the caseworkers, proppers, cabinets and portacabins. If the hon. Lady will give me the details of that case, I will look at it, because that should not be happening. What should be happening is exactly the same as what my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) laid out.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The Secretary of State is confident, it seems, that there are enough surveyors to do this work, but since she made this decision about schools, questions have been raised about many other public buildings and I suspect structural surveyors are now in much shorter supply. Is she still confident that structural engineers and surveyors will be available to do this work, and is she sticking to her timetable of having answers by the end of next week?

[Gillian Keegan]

I am confident that, because we started early, we have done a lot of these surveys already. Quite a lot of the schools were involved at the beginning, so I am confident of that. I am also confident that the NHS has conducted surveys of its main buildings, and I think the courts have also done surveys. However, we have now increased the number of surveying companies from three to eight to make sure that we can get through all the cases, including any that Members are concerned about, as soon as possible.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Back in January this year, I submitted a written question to the Government about the number of schools in my constituency of Wirral West that had buildings rated as very likely to collapse. In the response I received, the Schools Minister said:

“Department officials are clear that there are no areas within schools open to pupils where there is a known immediate risk of collapse.”

Presumably those buildings would be evacuated if that was the case—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I appreciate that the Secretary of State has been very generous in giving way to Members, but she will not be as aware as I am that there are 22 people who wish to speak this afternoon. The Secretary of State is very politely giving way to Members who are not going to take part in the debate, and if we have long interventions from those Members, people who are waiting to speak will not have the chance to do so when we come to the end of the debate. I am trying to get some fairness into this, but I do appreciate that the Secretary of State is being polite and I will allow her to respond to the intervention.

[Gillian Keegan]

Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker, and for giving me the reminder, because I do not want to take time away from people who have put in to speak. What my right hon. Friend the Schools Minister said is absolutely right: any time there is an immediate risk, action is immediately taken. However, what we were doing was more preventive than that: finding out where everything was, so that we could act. When the three new cases happened over the summer, that is when I made a decision to be very cautious, because I did not want to take any risk whatsoever. I knew exactly where to go, because I knew exactly which schools were judged as non-critical. I knew exactly what we needed to do.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

I am sorry but I will not give way. I know I promised the hon. Gentleman, but I will see if I can make a bit more progress.

We deposited copies of the school condition data in the House Libraries on 20 July this year, in advance of the summer recess. It is also available on the Parliament website, and I am sure that many Members who are interested in this subject will be interested in seeing it. The successor programme, CDC2, is now under way. Early indications from the programme, which has been under way since March 2021 and will finish in 2026, and feedback from the sector suggest that in almost every case where a D grade—a bad condition—was identified in CDC1, it has since been addressed. We are getting on with the job. That is a demonstration of the approach that I and my Department are taking: we identify where the issue is and how severe it is, then we take the right corrective action. That is what our children deserve and what our schools deserve. When we have data, we can act to improve our schools.

The 2021 spending review announced a total of £19 billion of capital funding to support the education sector between 2022-23 and 2024-25, including £5.4 billion for school condition allocations. That includes £3.6 billion announced in allocations for the first two years of the period to improve the condition of the school estate. That is in addition to the school rebuilding programme, which is rebuilding 500 schools over 10 years. That builds on nearly £30 billion of capital between 2016-17 and 2021-22, including over £13 billion for improving or replacing buildings.

Improving education is this Government’s mission. Ensuring that our education settings are safe is a key part of that, and we therefore prioritise it as part of our capital funding, and actively manage funding and support for the school estate to stay open and safe. I also note the distinction between our targeted approach and what came before. The system we inherited was found by an independent review of capital to be poorly targeted and wasteful. We on this side of the House have acted to protect children, while others have ignored problems for decades. School building is more effective and efficient than ever before. The significant investments made in education in recent years by this Government, coupled with essential reform, have raised standards for our children and given them a better chance of success in life.

Since 2010, we have reformed our capital programmes to bring down the cost of school building. The James review of education capital in 2011 found that Building Schools for the Future, the programme that the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South is proud of, was overly bureaucratic and did not deliver outcomes that were good or affordable. Just as the people of Birmingham are finding out so heartbreakingly today, and as I saw as a young girl growing up in Liverpool, the consequences of Labour always see things worse off than when they started. By contrast, at the 2020 spending review we announced our 10-year school rebuilding programme, which will transform buildings at 500 schools across England. We have already announced 400 of those schools, including 239 in December 2022, prioritising those in poor condition and with evidence of potential safety issues.

[Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Gillian Keegan]

Perhaps I could make a little more progress, as I feel I will not have been fair if I don’t.

We currently have a further 100 places on the programme, and the Government will continue to focus on investing in the school estate. We strive to deliver value for money—it is easy to spend money, but getting value for money is what the people of this country expect—and ensure that our capital funding is spent as efficiently as possible. As the National Audit Office concluded in 2017, the priority school building programme, the predecessor to our school rebuilding programme, replaced schools more efficiently, costing approximately a third less per square metre than the previous capital programme, Building Schools for the Future.

We committed to 500 schools over 10 years through our rebuilding programme, with an average of 50 schools entering delivery every year. That is in line with the scale of projects delivered every year since the start of its predecessor. There has been some debate about the scale of rebuilding in recent days, but the level of our ambition is unchanged. We have not scaled back our ambitions for school rebuilding, and we will not. Although the school rebuilding programme is in its initial stages of delivery, it is ramping up as more projects begin construction. The exact amount that rebuilding programmes spend will differ year on year, based on the stage of delivery that projects are in at any given time. That is the norm for significant capital projects, which means that when we try to make comparisons, a lot of cherry-picking goes on.

Overall since 2012, 524 schools have been rebuilt or refurbished through our central rebuilding programmes, and a further 408 are in the pipeline. We are building schools more quickly, more efficiently, and better targeted on condition and need than ever before. Sometimes, however, there will be issues that we have to deal with outside the normal processes. The role of Government and of Ministers is to respond to that, and to take ownership and full responsibility.

When new information about RAAC crossed my desk over the summer, I understood that the buck stopped with me, even if the problem was 50 years in the making. As I set out in my statement to the House on Monday, the safety of pupils and staff is this Government’s absolute priority. We have regularly and swiftly updated our guidance in line with the latest technical advice, to ensure that responsible bodies are aware of the risks and able to act. In light of the three new cases over the summer, and given the disparate nature of the schools estate and, most importantly, the fact that children were involved, we made the difficult decision that it was no longer reasonable or safe for spaces known to contain RAAC to be used. That was a very difficult decision, because there were operational implications for others, and an impact on parents and children.

It is important to note that the technical advice on RAAC does not say that we must put mitigations in place in all buildings—that is not what the RAAC advice says. Where RAAC is present, we can keep it as long as we manage it well. We have acted with the utmost caution to reassure parents and teachers, and to establish a comprehensive plan to mitigate and resolve settings with RAAC, because we know where they are. Let me be clear: we were able to do that only because we had prepared for this eventuality. I had hoped that that preparation would be unnecessary, but sadly it was not and I had to take a decision. I am grateful to previous Secretaries of State who made decisions to ensure that we were able to establish where RAAC was present, and to act rapidly. We could show leadership, we could show direction, and we could tell people exactly where to go with their portacabins and with their propping.

Professional advice from technical experts on RAAC has evolved over time, and the question of how to manage its risks has spanned successive Governments since 1994.

Nobody is blameless in that, including Labour Members, who were warned in 1999, 2002, and 2007 alike. Unlike them, I am interested in keeping our children safe and improving learning. They try to play politics, and they can play politics all they like, but as they are finding in Wales, the public can smell opportunism and recoil at politicians who fail to show leadership.

We on the Government side of the House saw the risk and decided to prepare. My Department alerted the sector about the potential risks of RAAC in 2018, and in February 2021 we issued guidance. We were concerned that not all responsible bodies were acting quickly enough, so we decided to take a more direct approach, as I laid out on Monday, ensuring that we got all the surveys. We found out where RAAC was and we took action.

The vast majority of schools will be unaffected, as we have set out in information published today, and 104 of the affected settings are offering face-to-face education for pupils. Each impacted school and college has a dedicated caseworker to help implement a mitigation plan. For the past few days that has been my main concern—operationalising this, and ensuring that we can establish and scale up a programme to give schools the support they need due to the decisions I had to take. Most people will receive little disruption to their education, but that could include using other spaces on the school site, or in nearby schools or elsewhere in the local area, until structural supports or temporary buildings are installed. Project delivery, property and technical experts will be on hand to support schools to put face-to-face education measures in place as quickly as possible. We have published the list of schools that we know to be affected by RAAC, and we will be publishing an update in two weeks. It was important to give those affected schools and colleges time to focus on mitigations with support from my Department, and to inform parents directly. Thanks to the hard work of education leaders and local councils, 104 settings are providing face-to-face learning for all pupils this week. A further 20 settings have hybrid arrangements in place, with some pupils learning off-site, while 19 have delayed the start of term by a few days to ensure that pupils can start attending face-to-face learning safely on site. Only a very small number—four—have needed to move to remote learning. We anticipate that the majority of those will be able to offer pupils face-to-face learning soon, ensuring that disruption to education is kept to a minimum. Nine settings have since been found not to have RAAC after being reinvestigated.

I want to be clear that we will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe, with extra funding coming from DFE capital budgets to fund mitigations. That includes paying for emergency mitigation work needed to make buildings safe, including alternative classroom space where necessary. Where schools need additional help with revenue costs, such as transport to other locations, we are actively engaging with every school affected to put appropriate support in place. We will also fund longer-term refurbishment projects, or rebuilding projects where needed—taking responsibility, taking action and showing leadership.

As all Members know, the spending review is the process that determines how the Government will spend money over the course of a Parliament. It would be inaccurate, incomplete and inappropriate to disclose the details requested of the sensitive negotiations between His Majesty’s Treasury and individual Departments—inaccurate, because it would show only part of the picture of a complex decision-making process that takes place between multiple Departments, Ministers, officials and other individuals with varying priorities; incomplete, because such a process has to look across the board at priorities and trade-offs for all Departments to ensure we can deliver for everyone, yet this motion focuses on only one; and inappropriate, because it would be categorically in breach of the long-standing traditions and expectations that confidential and often commercially sensitive information is not disclosed into the public domain and that officials can give full and frank advice to Ministers.

Some Labour Members present have themselves served in government. They know that those in the civil service use every ounce of their professional skill to help them as Ministers and deliver the objectives of the elected Governments they serve. I have to ask: what would those Members say to those officials about a motion that might result in the making public of the advice of civil servants—people who can never answer back themselves—which they had thought was being given to Ministers in confidence? We know that they would not want that to be done.

It is vital to the conduct of good government and very much in the public interest that officials and Ministers in Departments and across government have a safe space to provide free and frank advice to inform policy and spending decisions. I note that such an exemption is one of the bedrocks of the freedom of information laws that the Labour party introduced. In the case of the spending review and related discussions, anything else would undermine that position and make it harder for Governments—now and in the future—to make the right balance of decisions and to maximise value for money for the taxpayer. That cannot be right, regardless of party, colour or the political events of the day.

I repeat what I said at the start of this speech: nothing is more important than the safety of children and staff in our schools. We are investing billions of pounds rebuilding our schools and providing the funding and support that academy trusts, local authorities, dioceses and schools need to manage the school and college estate effectively. As the Prime Minister and Chancellor have said, we will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe in our schools. After this debate, I will return to that work and to overseeing the operational response that ensures we are keeping children safe and protected and their education ongoing. In the meantime, I urge all colleagues to vote against this motion this evening.

[Several hon. Members rose—]