Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the original budget was for the Property Data Survey in July 2011; and what the final budget was for that survey after 8,000 additional surveys were included in it.

The original budget for the Property Data Survey Programme was £13 million, which was increased to £20 million following the extension of the programme to include 8,000 further surveys.

It had always been the intention to complete school surveys, over time, on the new consistent basis established by the Property Data Survey Programme; this simply brought forward the expenditure from future years’ spend. As a result we have benefited from a consistent database that has been used to allocate maintenance funding to get the best return from the government's investment in the school estate.