PM shown evidence of ‘critical risk to life’ when chancellor, says former top civil servant at Department for Education

Rishi Sunak refused to properly fund a school rebuilding programme when he was chancellor, despite officials presenting evidence that there was “a critical risk to life” from crumbling concrete panels, the Department for Education’s former head civil servant has said.

After the department told Sunak’s Treasury that there was a need to rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year in England, he gave funding for only 100, which was then halved to 50, said Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary of the department from 2016 to 2020.

Conservative ministers more widely believed a greater funding priority was to build new free schools, Slater told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, as pupils returned to many schools in England for the new term.

“For me as an official, it seemed that should have been second to safety,” Slater said. “But politics is about choices. And that was a choice they made.”

  • @C4dOPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Yes and no; that thread didn’t have this morning’s revelations but it’s got more activity on it.

    Hard to know which of the Uk_politics and UnitedKingdom communities is better for these kinds of discussion.

    I’m subscribed to both and see both regularly.

    Thanks for signposting though!

    • tal
      2•1 year ago

      Oh, yeah, not saying “don’t discuss it here”, just that there’s a bunch of related material that already came up in discussion there; easy to make it available here by just linking to it.

    • GreatAlbatrossMEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      At the beginning, I considered doing redirection of posts. Then I realised, it’s probably easier if people decide for themselves, with UKP for really fine grained stuff.
      Like reports on north eastern quangos responsible for duck nutrition.

      • @C4dOPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Well let’s hope that this quango doesn’t find out that while I know loads about the nutritional value of ducks I know next to nothing about their nutritional needs.

        On a more serious note, I suspect that over time these things will settle themselves as increasing numbers of users opt for different communities over time. We’re at the point now where there are more posts and comments in my subscribed communities than I can reasonably keep up with, which is a new thing (and a good thing).