FLAGSHIP plans to rebuild every Mersey secondary school may be ripped up in a savage spending squeeze triggered by the recession.
Ageing schools in Wirral and Sefton are in danger of falling victim to the spending axe, as could those in Warrington, Chester and Ellesmere Port and Neston.
The revelation – unearthed in the small print of Monday’s dramatic emergency Budget – is the starkest evidence yet of how spending will be slashed after the next election.
It will anger parents and teachers who have long been promised that schools will be either replaced or refurbished. Many date back to before the Second World War.
To add to the Government’s embarrassment, ministers launched a fierce attack on the Tories for planning to axe the programme – only to now draw up plans that threaten the same result.
The local education authorities at risk are those in the later waves of the 15-year “Building Schools for the Future” (BSF) scheme, where work was not due to start until after 2010.
The programme is already under way – and protected – in Liverpool, where a £400m revamp of the city’s 30 high schools will begin at the 1,700-pupil Alsop High, in Walton. Similarly, the £150m replacement of all Knowsley’s high schools with seven learning centres, and the programmes in St Helens (£150m) and Halton (£100m), are safe.
But a little-noticed section of the Budget book says the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is now “assessing the value for money” of later waves of BSF, after wave six.
It throws doubt on the rebuilding programme in Wirral (waves 10-12), Sefton (waves 10-12), Ellesmere Port and Neston (waves 10-12), Warrington (waves 13-15) and Chester (waves 13-15). In a statement, schools minister Jim Knight insisted: “This is not a scaling back of BSF. It is absolutely right to make sure that the taxpayer gets value for money from every penny of capital investment.”
But a Treasury spokeswoman, asked if she could give a 100% guarantee that every school would be replaced as planned, replied: “I’m not going to say 100%”.
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, urged the Children’s Secretary to “make an urgent statement coming clean on this issue”.
He added: “There must be a real worry that the Government is planning to slash the later waves of the BSF programme – particularly given the cuts to capital investment after 2011.
“Although the Government has highlighted the potential to bring forward some school building projects, the fear must be that those local authorities in the later stages of the programme will lose out altogether.”
The assessment will be carried out as part of a new public value programme (PVP), which signals a new era of austerity for public services after 2010.
Most of the Budget headlines focused on the dramatic short-term tax cuts, but many economists believe that post-election spending cuts – estimated at £37bn – are even more significant.
Labour MPs who cheered the new 45% tax rate on the very wealthy, announced on Monday, are only slowly waking up to the cost to public services of the ballooning national debt.
Other programmes under threat include putting a teaching assistant in every school, a free nursery place for every two-year-old, new hospital buildings and new roads.
When, at the 2005 election, Labour claimed the Tories were planning £35bn of cuts, it claimed that could only be achieved “by cutting deep into frontline public services, such as schools, hospitals and police”.
