Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many further education college infrastructure projects are affected by the reclassification of colleges.

Following the decision by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to reclassify colleges to the public sector, we are supporting colleges to meet the requirements of managing public money, while retaining many of their key areas of autonomy and flexibility. Managing public money means public sector organisations may only borrow from private sector sources if the transaction delivers value for money for His Majesty’s Treasury. The department has put in place a consents process for any new commercial borrowing that colleges would like to undertake. We have already responded to six colleges which had urgent requests for commercial borrowing in December. The department has received 63 consent requests, of which 36 have capital projects as part of the request, from 24 colleges. Department officials are working through the requests for January in priority order and we will respond to colleges as quickly as possible.

In response to the ONS decision on reclassification, the department has designed a package of measures to enable colleges to deliver on the priorities in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and continue to invest in their estates. This includes an additional £150 million allocation of capital grant funding for condition improvement for 2023/4. These allocations are published on GOV.UK under Further Education reclassification capital allocation, which is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/fe-capital-funding#fe-reclassification-capital-allocation.

The overall skills capital investment in this spending review period is £2.8 billion over the 3 years.