Sunday, January 01, 2023
Unfulfilled promises
The I newspaper reports that a Government scheme announced under Boris Johnson’s premiership to build around a dozen schools alongside housing developments was wound down without any schools being built.
The paper says that the Developer Loans for Schools scheme, a £220m policy announced when Gavin Williamson was education secretary in 2019, was designed to cut overcrowding in schools caused by new housing developments. At the time, the Government claimed the policy would “deliver thousands of school places up front, so they are ready for communities before new properties are finished”. However, even by UK Government standards, the scheme was a complete flop:
One Whitehall source said it was “almost unprecedented” how poorly the scheme had gone, given the £220m funding guarantee behind it.
Criteria for applications submitted by developers required the area where the school would be built to have a demand for more pupil places, an approved application to open a new free school and planning permission to build extra homes. Applications also needed to show they provided value for money and the borrower had to be a UK-registered company and own the site.
As part of the pilot, which began in October 2019, developers were eligible for loans of up to £22m from the Government to build a school to help ease overcrowding. According to the loan terms, developers would have been charged interest on the loans, which the Department for Education (DfE) told Schools Week at the time would have been as “low as possible”.
One developer said that the interest rates, alongside potential legal liability on any faults in new school buildings meant developers spurned approaches to apply for loans.
Some of the developers involved also specialised in the building of residential housing, which required a different set of skills to the building of a school.
One industry insider said: “It’s one of those schemes that wasn’t publicised enough, and builders didn’t have good awareness of. It was bureaucratic and seemed very tough to actually get money out of.
“As with many Government projects, it starts off with a good idea at face value and a beneficial thought process, but came out completely unworkable. As a principle, it sounds like a great idea but the focus of the scheme wasn’t actually getting money out of it.”
Yet another government initiative designed on the back of a fag packet.
The paper says that the Developer Loans for Schools scheme, a £220m policy announced when Gavin Williamson was education secretary in 2019, was designed to cut overcrowding in schools caused by new housing developments. At the time, the Government claimed the policy would “deliver thousands of school places up front, so they are ready for communities before new properties are finished”. However, even by UK Government standards, the scheme was a complete flop:
One Whitehall source said it was “almost unprecedented” how poorly the scheme had gone, given the £220m funding guarantee behind it.
Criteria for applications submitted by developers required the area where the school would be built to have a demand for more pupil places, an approved application to open a new free school and planning permission to build extra homes. Applications also needed to show they provided value for money and the borrower had to be a UK-registered company and own the site.
As part of the pilot, which began in October 2019, developers were eligible for loans of up to £22m from the Government to build a school to help ease overcrowding. According to the loan terms, developers would have been charged interest on the loans, which the Department for Education (DfE) told Schools Week at the time would have been as “low as possible”.
One developer said that the interest rates, alongside potential legal liability on any faults in new school buildings meant developers spurned approaches to apply for loans.
Some of the developers involved also specialised in the building of residential housing, which required a different set of skills to the building of a school.
One industry insider said: “It’s one of those schemes that wasn’t publicised enough, and builders didn’t have good awareness of. It was bureaucratic and seemed very tough to actually get money out of.
“As with many Government projects, it starts off with a good idea at face value and a beneficial thought process, but came out completely unworkable. As a principle, it sounds like a great idea but the focus of the scheme wasn’t actually getting money out of it.”
Yet another government initiative designed on the back of a fag packet.
