The permanent secretary at the depertment for education has backed up Ed Balls's claims that all capital funding announcements when he was schools secretary.
Michael Gove’s claim yesterday that all Ed Balls’s spending plans when schools secretary “were based on unsustainable assumptions and led to unfunded promises” have been undermined by the permanent secretary at the Department for Education, who has written to Mr Balls to confirm that all capital funding announcements made when he was a Minister – including the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme – had the “appropriate cover” of the Treasury.
The education secretary’s scrapping of the BSF, which will result in 719 school redevelopments being axed, also undercuts George Osborne’s pledge in the Budget last month that “there will be no further reductions in capital spending totals”.
Mr Balls, one of the frontrunners to be the next leader of the Labour Party, had written to David Bell asking him to confirm all announcements were made with prior arrangement of the Treasury; future waves of BSF announcements were part of the Pre-Budget Report settlement; all capital projects had the full agreement of the department’s chief accounting officer; and no Ministerial direction was ever requested.
In his reply to the shadow education secretary, Mr Bell wrote:
During your time as Secretary of State, I can confirm that the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) worked closely with Her Majesty’s Treasury to ensure that appropriate cover was provided for all spending decisions…
If any actions on this, or any matter, were in breach of the requirements of propriety or regularity, I would have sought a Ministerial Direction. I can confirm that I made no such requests during your time as Secretary of State.
Describing the scrapping of the BSF programme as a “tragedy” for teachers and parents who would have benefited from new facilities, Mr Balls told the Commons that Labour would continue to fight to “save our new schools” and called yesterday “a black day for our country’s schools”.
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48 Responses to “Balls had full backing of Treasury for BSF committments”
Platform 10 » Blog Archive » Building Schools for the Future – Its flaws and how the coalition should respond
[…] Despite claims to the contrary from the Labour party, it is simply not true that the scrapping of Building Schools for the Future was a breaking of a promise made by George Osborne not to cut the totals of capital spending. A casual glance towards the actual budget would make it clear: the Government will make no further cuts to capital spending compared with the plans that it inherited. It did make clear, however, that it would undertake a fundamental review of all capital spending plans to ensure they are affordable and to identify the areas of spending that will achieve the greatest economic returns. Michael Gove made it clear in his statement to the house that he was cancelling the approach of BSF because it was an expensive, long winded and inefficient way of building schools. He did not say he was cancelling all new schools building. According to the actual figures the Coalition government is going to spend as much on new capital projects as the outgoing Labour government, in that case they might end up building more schools than Labour for the same amount of money. […]
Adam White
As explained here http://bit.ly/cp0zAS Ed Balls had full backing of Civil Servants for spending commitments related to BSF..
Stacey™
RT @theday2day: http://bit.ly/cp0zAS @edballsmp had full backing of Civil Servants for spending commitments related to BSF..