Leaving aside the colourful language
with which the English Education Secretary expressed herself in an unguarded
moment yesterday, what came through was a belief that parents should be
extremely grateful to the current government for acting after previous
governments had done nothing about the issue. If you assume, as the English
constitution does, that a new Prime Minister equals a new government, and that
a new government cannot be held responsible for the actions of its
predecessors, then she almost has half a point. In the real universe, the one
most of us inhabit, it’s rather more clear that the problem has been building
up for years, and that successive Tory governments have cut back school
building and refurbishment. At the moment it’s perceived as being primarily an
English problem, but that is at least partly down to the fact that the English
government has been slow
and reluctant to share information about
its findings. And when it comes to putting things right, we will come up
against the fact that English spending on rectification works directly impacts
the amount available in Wales, through the application of the Barnett formula.
It’s hard to believe that similar construction methods weren’t used as widely
in Wales as in England, and that there aren’t more problems waiting to be
exposed.
That rectification will be
costly, on which note Sunak
wants us to be grateful, apparently, that he only cut the rate of building
new or replacement schools down to 50 a year when he was Chancellor, a level in
line with what had happened under the previous (also Tory) administration, and
despite the fact that he was being told that the government needed to plan to
replace at least 400 a year. Even that higher figure is inadequate to meet the
need. England, we are told, has 22,000 schools: assuming that the planned
lifetime of each school is 40 years, then 550 need to be replaced every year
just to stand still. A replacement rate of 50 every year implies a planned average
building lifetime of 440 years. In Wales, there are around 1470 schools; if the
replacement rate were to match that in England (<0.25% per annum), there would be a similar
requirement for buildings to last hundreds of years.
Whilst this might appear an
entirely normal expectation to Wykehamists like Sunak (where some buildings
date back to 14th Century) or Old Etonians (some date back to 1440),
it really isn’t applicable to the schools most children attend. There certainly
are many buildings more than a century old (indeed, my old primary school was
built in 1908 and is still in use) and, arguably, there is no great rush to
replace them all on grounds of imminent collapse (although I still remember the
incident in the late 1950s when the ceiling in one of our classrooms fell down –
we had some time off while they assessed the rest). They were built to last. But
whether schools designed and built in an era when children sat at individual
desks in neat rows in strictly delineated classes are still entirely suitable
for delivering the modern curriculum is a more complex question, to say nothing
of the number of them which have some classes in demountable buildings
installed as a ‘temporary’ measure decades ago. The problems which have emerged
over the past week are largely in the (comparatively) newest schools, built
from the 1960s on, which were deliberately built not to last that long in order
to save on building costs at the time (and, although the problem identified is
with the concrete, it would be a mistake to blithely assume that that was the
only lifetime-limiting factor with the materials and methods used). The extent
to which building cheaply to last just a few decades makes sense depends
largely on whether there is a long term plan in place for eventual replacement.
And there isn’t, and never has been. That isn’t just a Tory problem; governments
of all colours have just assumed that the quoted lifespan was some sort of guaranteed
minimum, rather than an accurate assessment, and made no plans for a rolling programme
of rebuilding. It makes the economic projections for government expenditure
look ‘better’ (i.e. lower), although it does somewhat divorce them from reality
when this sort of need arises.
It’s not entirely unfair of
the Welsh government to say that their ability to deal with the problem is
constrained by London, although that’s not something which the perpetually and professionally
angry leader of the Welsh Tories is ever likely to admit. They have, perhaps,
been too ready to do nothing until England suddenly announced the problem, but
there is little that they can do about the funding issue until England acts.
And Hunt’s statement
that they will do whatever it takes as long as it doesn’t cost any more tells
us already that English action will be inadequate. Both questions (waiting for
England to lead on identifying the problem, and depending on English decisions
for funding) underline the issue at the heart of ‘devolution’; real power
remains elsewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee than an independent Welsh
government would have done any better (although it couldn’t have done much
worse). But we in Wales wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else, and would have
to take responsibility both for the problem and fixing it. That would surely be
an improvement on where we are now.
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