The House of Commons Library reported recently that:
In financial year 2021-22 capital spending by the Department for Education was around £4.9 billion, this was the lowest amount recorded since 2009-10 (in real terms 2022-23 prices). This includes capital spending on schools and also other establishments such as early years or further education providers.
Overall, between 2009-10 and 2021-22, Department for Education capital spending declined by 37% in cash terms and 50% in real terms.
In the context of the developing crisis about school buildings made from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), this matters. What it shows are three things.
The first was that Tory austerity massively cut investment in schools when, in fairness to Labour, they had appreciated the need to replace schools and had a programme to do so in 2010.
Secondly, as a result, the net investment in UK schools has declined significantly, and that now shows. There are more than 20,000 schools in England and 572 may contain unsafe (RAAC), according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report published in June. That is three per cent, near enough. But a decade or so ago, the issue would not have been of concern because beams were not falling out of ceilings at that time, and now they are. What could have been managed is now a crisis precisely because money was not spent at the right time.
Third, nothing is going to be done about this. Jeremy Hunt told Laura Kuenssberg yesterday that money would be spent to solve this problem. By the evening, that money was apparently coming from existing education budgets already allocated to schools. Even those schools with the immediate problem of finding new premises because theirs are dangerous are not, apparently, going to receive assistance.
A number of thoughts flow from this. The first is to ask who is in charge at the Treasury when the Chancellor can say one thing in the morning and someone is briefing something very different by the evening? That seems an especially important question that needs an answer.
Second, I seriously wonder how the Treasury does imagine a school with a fixed budget can manage this situation without support. There are always contingencies budgeted for within the Treasury. If this is not a situation demanding their use, I wonder what might be now?
Third, the politics of this need consideration. £1.6 billion can be found for a useless barge but nothing for the safety of children, whose education must be sacrificed to school repairs now.
Fourth, will real anger finally flow from this?
And fifth, when will people join up the dots? This problem is already happening in hospitals. And the evidence of the failure to invest is growing, everywhere. From rivers, to schools, to hospitals, to the failure to train people, to the simple breakdown in systems supplying things as basic as driving tests, the evidence of the failure to invest to make sure that public services can be supplied is overwhelming.
In most cases, there are three explanations for why that is happening. The first, of course, is a lack of spending on the necessary investment.
But to move beyond the obvious, the bigger reason for why that has not been noticed to date is that the government fails dismally to account for its actions on a proper basis by producing regular income statements and balance sheets that are reconciled by a cash flow statement. As a result, it has no perception. of the scale of underinvestment that austerity has created. It has simply pretended that this is not an issue.
Third, a system of national accounting that emphasises only debt without matching it with asset creation creates a fixation on all the wrong measures of economic performance, the consequences of which are coming home to roost now.
I am well aware that the Office for National Statistics - whose failure to supply useful data to the government is at the heart of this - will claim it has to account as it does to match international norms, to which my answer is that this is utter nonsense. As any accountant knows, just because such norms exist does not prevent you from producing information in the format required for best management decision-making. So, in all companies, there will be accounts in the required format to meet the needs of published financial reporting and other accounts in management format that are designed to inform decision-making. Ideally, they can be reconciled - but they will very often show quite different views, and that is quite acceptable. They are data prepared for different purposes. It's time the ONS met the country's needs for decision-useful data and not nonsense that has no perception of time within it and which almost entirely ignores the need to invest in the asset base of the country - which asset base the ONS is almost entirely oblivious to whilst it obsesses with debt.
To summarise, austerity has brought us to our knees.
Government dogma has permitted that.
Government accounting has overlooked and even encouraged the failure.
We need massive investment now, or matters will get very much worse.
This will cut income available for consumption in the short term - and we need to come to terms with that. We have been living way beyond our means.
But the funding for this is available. In a country with £15 trillion of financial wealth it is absurd to suggest otherwise.
What we will, however, need is the willingness to turn that wealth to public advantage and if inflation is to be controlled, that will require significant new taxes on wealth. My publication programme on this issue will begin this week.
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It will be interesting to see what Labour come up with to respond to this crisis.
It should be an open goal, as there couldn’t be a clearer example to allow them to attack years of Tory misrule and austerity, but they’ve painted themselves into a corner. I suspect Reeves will witter something about finding some money down the back of the sofa somewhere to make things a little better and entirely fail to make (political) hay from this catastrophe.
“Hunt told Laura Kuenssberg yesterday that money would be spent to solve this problem.” Vile-tory, interviewed by vile-tory, being economical with reality. Not so much a programme as free PR for the vile-tories.
Missing: what proportion of vile-tories educate their offspring @ private schools. +50%?. Why would the vile-tories fix a problem that affects mostly non-tories? Well you wouldn’t would you? (if you were a vile-tory).
The end point of all this, from the point of view of the vile-tories is a Uk state very similar to that in the period 1820 to 1830 – the main state bodies being, the armed forces, the militia, the courts and jails. Step out of line and, if lucky you will be transported, if less so, judicially murdered. England is heading towards a failed state status. The next election will solve nothing, because the meeja (see above) will ensured Vile-tory-lite is elected, different faces, quasi-identical policies, and an electorate offered no choice whatsoever i.e. a situation more or less identical to the 1820s (if your vote changes nothing – why have one?).
PS: for those that would like a feel for the period mentioned, “A Very English Agent” by Julian Rathbone is educative.
I agree with the views here that the Tories have no sensible policies to improve the lot of the people of the UK, past, present or future, and no apparent understanding of the damage being done in pursuit of their ideologies. It smells strongly of either gargantuan incompetence, disaster capitalism or a toxic mix of both. But even more dangerous, in my view, is the absence of any clear, sensible policies in the Labour Party and the proposed continuation of the policies and dogma of the Tories if Labour ever get to power.
I say more dangerous because the absence of any effective opposition is uncannily like Brasil in the 1970s when a military dictatorship with far-right views was the government and it used to boast of Brasil’s democracy, given that there was an opposition party and everyone had to vote by law. The snag was that the “opposition” was approved (and effectively therefore appointed) by the dicatators. Members of the public who didn’t vote and had no legitimate reason for abstaining could be prosecuted and jailed. The UK boasts of its democracy too but overlooks the distortions of FPTP, gerrymandering etc and today it is heading swiftly in the direction of having an opposition which is indistinguishable from the other major party.
Waken up Scotland, Wales and N Ireland if you want to have an identity and a future where your people have their say and, especially, waken up England: the whole edifice of the UK is crumbling – schools today, NHS, Justice, local government etc to follow – and you need to sort the rot urgently. I’ve often wondered just what it would take to get the British out on the streets in civil disobedience; it may now be the only way to stop the rot.
The undermining of Hunt, from within; by the Treasury, is astonishing. Some Conservatives must believe that if they can sell the ‘household budget’ scam to the public, they can sell any rubbish to them, any time.
The RAAC problem has been known about by engineers since at least 1992. Austerity has led to spending cutbacks that now leave us with a bill far, far larger than austerity ever saved. That is the ruinous reality of austerity. The Conservatives are demolishing the country in front of our eyes. It can’t go on like this for another twelve months with this catastrophic collection of failures in charge.
Meanwhile, if you live in Scotland, BBC News insists the big political issue is the Rutherglen by-election…….From 8am, BBC GMS raises RAAC only at 8.45am, and manages to parochialise it; presumably not to dwell on a British scale political calamity on BBC Scotland.
This is where the Tories should be beaten around the head with their favourite household budget metaphor. Any household knows they need to keep their property in good repair. Didn’t Osborne himself go on about fixing the roof..?
Oops, blooper; that should be BBC GMS, around 8.25am.
Basically you cannot have assets without investing in them, otherwise that other dark side of an asset – the liability side – increases.
The unanswered question for me is , did the Tories know about this when they started their austerity crusade – are they just that stupid?
Or has this been done to just ensure a tsunami of crises that will inundate the public sector and mean a fire-sale of assets to the private sector? Good old fashioned disaster capitalism?
I feel that the TINA we are being presented is crisis based – it’s deliberate.
In a decent world, the Tories would never be allowed into power again. Any new politics should be discussing this matter.
The Tories have not been custodians of our country, they have been wreckers and barrow boys for the private sector.
Personally, I find them disgusting.
What we are really talking about in so many of these issues is wealth and the power it confers to buy up and dominate the means of communication and then when you get far enough down that road, the power conferred by wealth to buy up and dominate politics.
Rather like Trump’s constant lying and megalomaniac ravings, the lack of ability to resist and deal with the damage done by great wealth and the power it confers is a pandemic that is close to overwhelming the democratic societies in which we live.
It is hard to keep up as this disaster unfolds. Jonathon Slater, a past Permanent Secretary at the Dept. of Education has claimed on BBC Radio 4 that: “education officials had asked for funding to replaced between 300 and 400 schools a year because of the problem. However, they were only given the green light to replace around 100 of them”. Sunak – then Chancellor – later cut the list to 50. Slater said about the request: “We weren’t just saying there’s a significant risk of fatality, we were saying there was a critical risk to life if this programme is not funded.” (Quotations – Huff Post).
There is no hiding place, but here is how the Conservatives and Treasury manage the crisis: “Whatever it takes” doesn’t mean “Whatever it takes”; it means whatever is in the budget. So, if this is fixed you can be sure that somewhere you don’t know something else isn’t being done to maintain something critical.
Sunak and his repellant crew should be out of Downing Street by the end of the week.
Thank you Mr Warren – useful stats.
Happy to have a bet that the 50 schools finally selected were in vile-tory voting areas – after all, can’t have vile-tory voters getting upset can we? & as for engineers & their advice, the Uk is where it is because they are regarded by what passes for the “Uk elite” as at best 3rd class.
If anyone finds this information, please share
Sunak has rushed out to challenge Slater, but seems in a frightful muddle. Note that Slater asked for resource to tackle 300-400 schools per year, then. This became 100, then 50:
“[A]sked if he was to blame for the concrete crisis, Mr Sunak said: ‘I think that is completely and utterly wrong. Actually one of the first things I did as chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school re-building programme for 500 schools.Now that equates to about 50 schools a year, that will be refurbished or rebuilt. If you look at what we have been doing over the previous decade, that’s completely in line with what we have always done” (Sky News).
Just look at that response. Slater asks for resources for 300-400 “a year”. This is wrong because Sunak decided it should be 500 over 10 years; or 50 a year; which as far as I can see is what Slater claimed. So in Sunak’s world 50 a year is the same as 300-400 a year. Sunak is right because he is wrong. This is the world we are living in.
In a rational world Sunak would be out of a job by close of business, today.
I constantly have problems with bloopers; especially autocorrect, which often auto-mistakes. Writing this comment autocorrect tried to re-write Sunak, as “sunk”. Autocorrect clearly has some special AI prophetic insight.
I keep thinking about this.
People keep talking about a massive infrastructure spend on numerous projects and I wonder, ‘do we have the capacity to do it?’
In monetary terms, yes, in manpower, resource terms, maybe?
We’re looking at a low unemployment rate, though many more on long term disability/sick etc…
But I also think that in a services, consumption based economy we have a lot of people that are underemployed.
I kind of like the idea of the State putting a floor under wages, so that people working in these low productivity service based jobs have a public option (a job guarantee basically). ‘Come work for us, we’ll pay you £15-£20 an hour. It redeploys people into much needed infrastructure projects and forces the private sector to shape up and offer higher wages themselves.
These will all be productive jobs, with taxes and national insurance and everything. The country gets better collectively. Why aren’t we doing this?
The Tories think the private sector will do this through tax incentives and suchlike.
To paraphrase an old saying, ‘you can lead an investor to investment, but you can’t make them invest.’
You are right to think about what is a massive issue
Gillian Keegan MP, Secretary of State for Education has said on Sky that there will be no new money, but the costs will be covered by the DfE.
“Ms Keegan could not say how much funding would be ringfenced towards the issue but admitted it was likely to cost ‘many, many millions of pounds’ – as some schools will have to be rebuilt. Asked if schools that are already strapped for cash will have to find more money, Ms Keegan insisted: ‘No, we will pay for that.’ Asked if the money will come out of school budgets, Ms Keegan said: ‘No. It’s coming out of the Department for Education.’
Work out what that means. If there is no new money It can only mean something else will be cut. It isn’t hard to figure out the cost of this means schools will pay a heavy penalty somewhere else; so much for “whatever it takes”. Keegan also said more surveyors are being hired, but seems a little vague about how many schools are affected.
That is education. Then there are all the other government, public service buildings in the court system, hospitals and no doubt numerous others.
William the Conqueror established exactly what he owned in the Domesday Book. He did a better job of establishing what he owned, and what condition it was in for his whole State in the 11th century, than the Conservatives can manage to do for the public estate alone in the 21st century. The Conservatives have no idea, even about the condition of the assets the Government owns. What should that tell us about Conservative government, or Conservative management, or the dilapidated state of Britain today? How does that happen? Because they live and work in chaos, and in the eternal present, as if there is neither future nor past. They know nothing about anything, except staying in power with the help of media friends.
Quotations from Sky News.
Gillian Keegan has now apologised for a “sweaty rant” (about an interviewer asking awkward questions about a Government mess, caught by a stray mike). She believes she had done a ******* good job. There is a politician with no understanding of her own insignificance, faced with a pent-up 30+ year disaster; and no planning and no resources.
We may ask, doing a good job, doing what precisely? supplying surveyors thirty years late? If she is just genuinely trying to do a good job, what on earth is she doing in the Conservative Party? What endemic lack of insight does she have, that she rose to Cabinet level in that Party without even noticing she was surrounded by charlatans, all richly deserving sweaty rants about sitting on their *****; of missing the point, or making bad decisions, or kicking problems into the long grass. It is what Conservatives do. Spend money making their own voters richer and and do nothing for anybody or anything else. Who is she kidding? Probably herself.
Let the future generations clean up the mess (the corollary of not using debt, or having a trade surplus – and Britain is incapable of producing a trade surplus).
I have been tweeting this.
As The News Agents noted, it was pretty ballsy of ITN to put this after interview clip out – and some indocation of the fallen status of this governmnt that they did so.
Hilarious. we have now had the apology for the rant. She isn’t frustrate at anybodying sitting on their *****. Well, except for those slow to hand in their questionnaires. I am not joking. She is frustrate by slow questionnaire returns. She wants praise for sending out questionnaires (cost, probably 2p a ‘pop’); for a 30+ year crisis? They clearly do not have have a proper status and inventory manual for their own building estate, when it is clearly grossly inadequate and out of date. She clearly hasn’t a clue about the final answer; the numbers, the fix, the cost, the timescale. And she wants praise?
This is how we are governed; by narcissistic fantasists.
…and before austerity were many decades of investing the bare minimum.
My late step-father, a highways civil engineer, was constantly infuriated by projects based on, for example, traffic-volume projections that were known to be serious under-estimates, so by the time a road or a bridge opened, it was already functionally obsolete. It’s pretty much the same in all public infrastructure – this crisis has been a very long time coming.
Oddly, not my father’s story from the period up to privatisation of electricity
Perhaps the aim, after a suitably emotional disaster has happened involving multiple deaths of children/patients/jurists, is for whichever party is in power to hand over parts of the country to corporations to run on the basis they have the money and can afford it while the nation doesn’t and can’t. That’s one way the Charter Cities idea might openly be introduced in a manner acceptable to the ill-informed public.
There are 24,000 schools in England. Sunak thinks he has done a great job by making the resources available to refurbish or rebuild 500 schools in 10 years. Work that plan through the estate. At that rate it would take 100 years to refurbish 5,000 schools; and that is only 21% of the total schools estate, so basically our schools (probably built for a 50 year life, at best – forgetting modernisation and redundancy of facilities) are expected to last in their current state – for centuries.
The reality of the Conservative Party is that there is no past, there is no future; just an eternal present. The claim they make that “debt” passed to our grandchildren must be avoided is false. It is only by transferring financial future expectations into present reality that we can provide anyone’s grandchildren with any future at all.
I think that’s the critical statistic
Even RAAC schools will take more than a decade
I’m no cheerleader for Old New Labour (indeed quite the opposite) but it has to be said they did some very good things in Education. Every Child Matters and Building Schools for the Future being key. Both were scrapped pretty much day one in 2010 by Michael Gove.
Building Schools for the Future sought to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school by 2020 (although the NAO thought that goal overly ambitious at the time).
The price of Tory austerity fetishism is seen all around us but now front and centre in death trap school buildings along with a hidden mental health crisis in children and young people. Austerity is quite literally killing us whilst also robbing our children of their health and their future
I see that Rosina Allyn Khan has resigned from Starmer’s front bench as he sees no place for mental health in the cabinet.
Will Hutton’s good Observer piece on failure to renew infrastructure:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/chaos-in-skies-crumbling-concrete-in-schools-grim-symptoms-british-disease
But look how the false perception is inculcated. Radio4’s ‘Thought for the day’ by Bishop James Jones(?) – said it could be a beneficial learning experience for children to experience collapsing schools, or being delayed for days coming back from holiday. It could teach them to be more self reliant – as if these disasters were natural disasters.
No mention that it might teach them to ask what was the real cause – could it be government’s failure to take care? Could it teach them that they might be able to influence whether it happens again by being active in a democracy?
If your ‘Thought’ isn’t propaganda – what is my Lord Bishop?
If that is what he had to say, what an idiot.
He didnt put it so crudely – but that was his message.
In my corner of northern England, where Labour held strong, the local high school is currently being partially redeveloped under DfE’s School Rebuilding Programme. But…as I understand it, the funding was destined for a school rebuild in the South East which was unable to proceed due to labour shortages across the building sector. Available trades and a suitable site allowed the project to be accelerated. A one-off or symptomatic of a deeper problem across construction in England?
“You’ve got to spend money to make money” was an old maxim that I was familiar with as a child. Unfortunately, this basic fact has been systematically obliterated by the Tory austerity experiment and the ongoing media propaganda desperately trying to maintain austerity no matter who is in power. Politics Live demonstrated that all of the guests had bought into the “who’s going to pay for it” fallacy that has facilitated the Tory austerity policy that I think of as ‘economic cannibalism’.
A similar term was chosen by American author Nancy Fraser in her book entitled ‘Cannibal Capitalism,’ she describes, “How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do about It.” Although she was writing about the US the title is equally applicable to the UK. I read an interview with Nancy Fraser that was printed in the New Republic:
https://newrepublic.com/article/168198/cannibal-capitalism-destroying-societys-basic-structures-nancy-fraser-interview
The New Republic description of the book states that this is: “A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite–and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world. Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital–and starve it to death.”
How can we make the public aware of this massive con trick? Design billboards that Led By Donkeys could put up to get the word out? This is a very successful leftwing organization who certainly should be very receptive to the truth about the damage done by austerity, the long overdue need to invest, and why a Fiat Currency does not need to rely on upping the tax take to fund capital expenditure.
A rather whacky idea I mentioned in my call to you, was to consider writing a children’s book about money. I know of nothing out there right now that fully addresses this subject in a really basic pictorial format to target say, ten to teens. I never had children, but I think parents would get this for their kids to learn about how to manage personal finances while at the same time helping the next generation differentiate between their personal budget and the UK budget. Before you fall off your stool laughing, what about filling that crucial learning void?
When I was growing up, although you occasionally saw a tramp in ragged clothes, you didn’t see people regularly sleeping rough in doorways. As far as I’m aware there were no Food Banks as they weren’t necessary. My life as an eco-nomad began when I left the country at the age of seventeen, but if I had stayed in the UK I could have taken one full-time steady job that paid enough for me to live independently. While MPs obsess over getting on the housing ladder, it cruelly obscures the reality that many young people in their thirties are still unable to afford to leave home. There has been a steady regression in the quality of life in the UK, we are heading towards what some call ‘feudal capitalism,’ and others describe as ‘Cannibal Capitalism,’ As if my reading list wasn’t long enough… add one more book.
I really am not a children’s book author …..
WhenI was growing up there were no foodbanks but there were soup kitchens.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Labour took this latest Tory own goal as a chance not just to point out how useless the Tories are, but this really does show that the public sector is not in any way safe in their hands. If Labour ever wanted to make the investment case in our public services and that following cast iron fiscal rules will not work when you have a crumbling public service, now is the time to do it.
Let’s add them up.
A failing and costly transport system.
Gas and Electricity companies that make massive profits while people struggle to heat their homes.
Water companies that pollute our waters – and make massive profits.
Now we have the potential of a threat to children’s safety because the Tories have known about the problem for years but can’t be bothered to do anything.
The RAAC problem goes much further than schools. I was reading today how it might effect social housing (council housing?) that was built in the 50’s 60’s and 70’s.
https://www.building.co.uk/news/calls-for-social-landlords-to-start-urgent-raac-inspection-programme/5124967.article
The list of Tory failure is endless. We know the Tories hate the state, and it is now finally falling apart all around us. Literally falling apart.
Then there is one other thing that I think needs to be monitored closely. Who the Tories give the contracts to for this work to be done. We know the Tories use public money to line the pockets of their mates and for themselves. The RAAC clean up will not be cheap, the urgency of it will probably mean that some will see it as a way to make easy money. Given the Tories record (PPE scandal and many others) I wouldn’t be surprised if we read the same about the reponse to RAAC in years to come.
Agreed
What you are failing to recognise is the implication of what you are suggesting:
1) despite the increase in spending each and every year since 2008, this was still not sufficient and the true cost of public services is much higher than previously thought
2) adding the other costs which are normally hidden (repair / upgrade / investment), pensions costs etc, the cost of the public sector would be much higher than thought, leading to a much higher ongoing deficit – clearly unsustainable.
Is that really the message / implications that you are keen to highlight?
I am not failing to recognise anything
What I am appreciating is that this country has too small a public sector
Our major and richer neighbours appreciate that
You suggest that Great Britain is a rich country with £15tn in financial wealth.
But just suppose that it were a poor country and that financial wealth wasn’t there – how would you go about creating wealth and funding State building projects?
I deal with the real world
Fantasy is for others
So, how long before we get another Aberfan then as a result of the austerity ideology pursued by our useless politicians?
A classroom or two of children killed as a result of a roof collapsing on them? Nice. Or perhaps it’ll happen in one of the other public buildings which should have been maintained properly but haven’t been because the idiots running the UK don’t believe in investment in the country?
Westminster. A disaster destroying the UK.
All the debate is about government investment but it has been much the same in the private sector. It’s not just just the privatised utilities that have underinvested but the private sector as a whole. That in turn reflects a banking and finance sector that is only interested in extracting wealth from existing assets and businesses, not in actual investment.
No surprise that we have a government heavily influenced by financial interests and led by a Goldman Sachs alumni.
Plus of course private investment is so often catlyised by or follows public sector investment, renewables being a prime example.
Agreed