Labour says Sunak has ‘huge culpability’ for Raac school building crisis – UK politics live – The Guardian

September 4, 2023

Labour says Sunak has ‘huge culpability’ for Raac school building crisis

Good morning. Although, meteorologically, it may not feel like it, in political terms summer is definitely over and, with the Commons recess over, a new Westminster season is starting. Within the next few weeks we are getting the party conferences, a king’s speech and an autumn statement. Polling day is probably coming in just over a year. If you had to identify any day as the start of the long election campaign, today would be as good a choice as any.

Rishi Sunak needs to defend his record as PM. According to polling published by Politico, “two-thirds of people think Sunak has achieved ‘only a slight amount’ or nothing at all in his premiership so far”. But this morning he is facing criticism for decisions he made as chancellor. In a remarkable interview, Jonathan Slater, a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education, told the Today programme that Sunak halved funding for school building repairs – even though the DfE had made a very strong case that new schools had to be built because of the risk to life posed by weak concrete (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or Raac).

Slater, who was permanent secretary at the DfE from May 2016 to August 2020, said the department thought between 300 and 400 schools needed to be replaced per year. He said the DfE got funding to repair 100 per year. In 2021 it asked for money to fix 200 schools a year, Slater said. He went on:

We know 300 to 400 needed, but the actual ask in 2021 was to double the 100 to 200. I thought we’d get it but the actual decision made in 2021 was to halve down from 100 a year to 50 year.

Asked who was chancellor at the time, Slater confirmed it was Sunak.

I will post more from Slater’s interview shortly. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, has been responding in her own interview round. She told Today that since she had been in the job, she had got an extra £2bn for schools. I will cover what she said in more detail soon.

Commenting on the Slater interview, Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said:

The defining image of 13 years of the Conservative-run education system will be children sat under steel girders to stop the roof falling in.

Rishi Sunak bears huge culpability for his role in this debacle: he doubled down on Michael Gove’s decision to axe Labour’s schools rebuilding programme and now the chickens have come home to roost – with yet more disruption to children’s education.

Labour warned time and again about the risks posed by the crumbling schools estate under the Conservatives but were met with complacency, obstinacy and inaction.

We are also expecting Keir Starmer to conduct a shadow cabinet reshuffle today. Most of the senior figures in his team, including Phillipson, are not due to move, but Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is likely to be given a new department to shadow. Currently, she shadows the Cabinet Office minister.

Here are other items on the day’s agenda.

Morning: Sunak is due to record a pooled clip for broadcasters.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: The new MPs elected for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, for Selby and Ainsty and for Somerton and Frome in the byelections in the summer, will be sworn in.

After 3.30pm: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, is expected to give a statement to MPs about the Raac crisis.

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PA Media has just snapped this.

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Former cabinet minister Sir Gavin Williamson should apologise to MPs for bullying former chief whip Wendy Morton after he was not allocated tickets to the late Queen’s funeral, the independent expert panel said.

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The full report is here. I will post more details from it shortly.

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As mentioned earlier, Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, defended the government’s response to the school building crisis during her morning interview round. (See 9.07am.) Here are the main lines from her interviews.

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Keegan defended the Treasury’s decision to cut funding for school repairs when Rishi Sunak was chancellor. Responding to the criticisms from Jonathan Slater, the former DfE permanent secretary, she said it was normal for departments not to get all the money they wanted. She said:

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There’s always a challenge in terms of putting forward your case for funding, and how much you get. And every department will always put forward a case for more than they actually get. What you have to do is demonstrate good value for money.

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She also said that she has recently announced 239 school rebuilding projects.

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She said that she changed the guidance for schools with Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) after new evidence emerged over the summer suggesting that buildings deemed “non-critical” were more dangerous than had been assumed. She was being “very cautious”, she said. She explained:

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What happened over the summer is we had three cases – not in schools, some in schools, some not in schools – and I sent structural engineers out to see them, somewhere in commercial settings, and some in different jurisdictions.

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And when they went out to see them, they thought there’d been a failure, but it was in a non-critical setting. So that was new evidence and new information …

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So I decided to take a very cautious approach. And I knew it was going to be difficult because, you know, obviously, for parents, for teachers, this coming so late in August, but that’s when we got the evidence that a panel had failed in a roof that had previously been classified as non-critical.

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I wasn’t willing to take the risk. It was just one panel, but it was in a roof that had been assessed as non-critical.

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She said that most schools with Raac problems would remain open. In most of them, only part of a building was affected, she said. She told Sky News:

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Most of the schools will be open …

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The vast majority of children will be going back today. There will be some where they’ve got quite extensive Raac so they may close so that we can put temporary accommodation in place.

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Many schools are either looking for alternative accommodation, if they’re within a multi-academy trust or within a local authority, or moving to another classroom if they’ve got spare classroom.

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If it’s across the whole school, then that gets more difficult. So what we’re doing right now is we’ve assigned a caseworker for each one of the schools, for working with the school to figure out what the mitigation plans are.

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She said she would publish a list of schools affected by the Raac crisis later this week. But she wanted to ensure that schools on the list have the chance to tell parents first, she said.

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She said there are 104 schools previously classed as non-critical where emergency procedures for structure issues are now in place. But she said potentially hundreds of schools were still responding to surveys about their buildings.

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She said three portable cabin companies were among the firms helping the DfE respond to the crisis. She said:

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We’ve now increased to eight surveying companies. We have a national propping company who’s all prepared to go in and prop.

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And we have contracted with three Portakabin or temporary accommodation companies who have on stock the Portakabins available.

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n

We know 300 to 400 needed, but the actual ask in 2021 was to double the 100 to 200. I thought we’d get it but the actual decision made in 2021 was to halve down from 100 a year to 50 year.

n

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Asked who was chancellor at the time, Slater confirmed it was Sunak.

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Commenting on the Slater interview, Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said:

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n

The defining image of 13 years of the Conservative-run education system will be children sat under steel girders to stop the roof falling in.

n

Rishi Sunak bears huge culpability for his role in this debacle: he doubled down on Michael Gove’s decision to axe Labour’s schools rebuilding programme and now the chickens have come home to roost – with yet more disruption to children’s education.

n

Labour warned time and again about the risks posed by the crumbling schools estate under the Conservatives but were met with complacency, obstinacy and inaction.

n

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Here are other items on the day’s agenda.

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Morning: Sunak is due to record a pooled clip for broadcasters.

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11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

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2.30pm: The new MPs elected for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, for Selby and Ainsty and for Somerton and Frome in the byelections in the summer, will be sworn in.

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After 3.30pm: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, is expected to give a statement to MPs about the Raac crisis.

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Key events

Gavin Williamson should apologise for bullying former chief whip during funeral tickets row, watchdog says

PA Media has just snapped this.

Former cabinet minister Sir Gavin Williamson should apologise to MPs for bullying former chief whip Wendy Morton after he was not allocated tickets to the late Queen’s funeral, the independent expert panel said.

The full report is here. I will post more details from it shortly.

Gillian Keegan says she was being ‘very cautious’ when she ordered safety measures for schools with Raac

Keegan defended the Treasury’s decision to cut funding for school repairs when Rishi Sunak was chancellor. Responding to the criticisms from Jonathan Slater, the former DfE permanent secretary, she said it was normal for departments not to get all the money they wanted. She said:

There’s always a challenge in terms of putting forward your case for funding, and how much you get. And every department will always put forward a case for more than they actually get. What you have to do is demonstrate good value for money.

She also said that she has recently announced 239 school rebuilding projects.

She said that she changed the guidance for schools with Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) after new evidence emerged over the summer suggesting that buildings deemed “non-critical” were more dangerous than had been assumed. She was being “very cautious”, she said. She explained:

What happened over the summer is we had three cases – not in schools, some in schools, some not in schools – and I sent structural engineers out to see them, somewhere in commercial settings, and some in different jurisdictions.

And when they went out to see them, they thought there’d been a failure, but it was in a non-critical setting. So that was new evidence and new information …

So I decided to take a very cautious approach. And I knew it was going to be difficult because, you know, obviously, for parents, for teachers, this coming so late in August, but that’s when we got the evidence that a panel had failed in a roof that had previously been classified as non-critical.

I wasn’t willing to take the risk. It was just one panel, but it was in a roof that had been assessed as non-critical.

She said that most schools with Raac problems would remain open. In most of them, only part of a building was affected, she said. She told Sky News:

Most of the schools will be open …

The vast majority of children will be going back today. There will be some where they’ve got quite extensive Raac so they may close so that we can put temporary accommodation in place.

Many schools are either looking for alternative accommodation, if they’re within a multi-academy trust or within a local authority, or moving to another classroom if they’ve got spare classroom.

If it’s across the whole school, then that gets more difficult. So what we’re doing right now is we’ve assigned a caseworker for each one of the schools, for working with the school to figure out what the mitigation plans are.

We’ve now increased to eight surveying companies. We have a national propping company who’s all prepared to go in and prop.

And we have contracted with three Portakabin or temporary accommodation companies who have on stock the Portakabins available.

Gillian Keegan being interviewed this morning. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

Branwen Jeffreys, the BBC’s education editor, suggests that Jonathan Slater’s interview this morning may in part have been retaliation for the way he was forced to resign after the exam grading row in 2020. Many observers felt Gavin Williamson, education secretary at the time, should have gone instead.

Writing on X/Twitter, Jeffreys says:

It is hard to overstate how extraordinary it is for a former senior civil servant to speak out like this – in part Jonathan Slater is speaking out to make utterly clear their advice over RAAC was ignored & Sunak cut back spending further

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It is hard to overstate how extraordinary it is for a former senior civil servant to speak out like this – in part Jonathan Slater is speaking out to make utterly clear their advice over RAAC was ignored & Sunak cut back spending further

— branwen jeffreys (@branwenjeffreys) September 4, 2023

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It is hard to overstate how extraordinary it is for a former senior civil servant to speak out like this – in part Jonathan Slater is speaking out to make utterly clear their advice over RAAC was ignored & Sunak cut back spending further

— branwen jeffreys (@branwenjeffreys) September 4, 2023

It’s also hard not to hear the sound of chickens coming home to roost – Slater is just one of the respected permanent secretaries forced out by nest this government- breaking the tradition that ministers took responsibility for their decisions

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It’s also hard not to hear the sound of chickens coming home to roost – Slater is just one of the respected permanent secretaries forced out by nest this government- breaking the tradition that ministers took responsibility for their decisions

— branwen jeffreys (@branwenjeffreys) September 4, 2023

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It’s also hard not to hear the sound of chickens coming home to roost – Slater is just one of the respected permanent secretaries forced out by nest this government- breaking the tradition that ministers took responsibility for their decisions

— branwen jeffreys (@branwenjeffreys) September 4, 2023

Here is Peter Walker’s story about what Jonathan Slater said in his Today interview. (See 9.07am.)

One aspect that was remarkable was that former permanent secretaries are normally reluctant to speak out directly on political matters, or to criticise the ministers for whom they used to work. Or at least that used to be the case. But in recent years ministers have become increasingly willing to attack their officials in public – Suella Braverman, the home secretary, was at it the other day, saying the Bibby Stockholm debacle was all the fault of civil servants – and Slater’s interview may be evidence that the mandarin class is now minded to retaliate.

(Another example would be Simon McDonald, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary, giving an interview last year that triggered the resignation of Boris Johnson.)