Does BSF have a future?

Building Schools for the Future is the government’s flagship programme for investing in schools infrastructure, but its future could be in doubt if the Conservatives win the next elections. Helen Mooney reports.

In November, the shadow cabinet office minister Francis Maude signalled that a Conservative government would scale back the government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme if the Conservative Party wins the next election.

He was subsequently reported to have told a group of construction industry executives that it was the intention of the Conservative Party to utilise community halls, churches and prefabricated huts to extend and renovate secondary school buildings rather than funding local authorities in the creation of new school premises.

What the BSF programme will look like under Tory regime is not yet clear, but could Mr Maude’s suggestions signal the end of a Labour government programme which has seen more than its fair share of highs and lows?

BSF is the government’s investment programme for secondary school buildings across England. The programme is intended to renew all 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales by 2020, entirely rebuilding half of them, heavily remodelling a further third and refurbishing the rest.

Essentially the £55bn BSF scheme decentralises government funding to Local Education Partnerships (LEPs). With £2 billion worth of investment in its first year, the government claims it is the single biggest government investment programme in education for over 50 years.

Vaulting ambition

There is no doubt it has been ambitious in costs, timescales and objectives and politicians and the media have constantly questioned its cost effectiveness.  A National Audit Office report in February 2009 found that BSF was 23% over-budget, with the government needing to double the rate of construction and spend £3.7bn each year from 2010 if it were to remain on schedule.

In response, Partnerships for Schools (PfS), the government agency in charge of delivering the scheme, has said that a 2008 review of procurement would save £250m from the programme and that a further internal review was planned to reduce costs further.

Nevertheless, the criticism of the programme – not least from the Conservative Party – has yet to die down.

Richard Fleetwood heads up Addleshaw Goddard’s BSF practice team.  He admits that the programme was subjected to a “serious amount of heat early on”.  “However, I think the time that was spent doing the consultation working and getting the documents done has proved well spent. Today my take on the programme is that the standardisation process has been successful, the process of getting deals through now has been hugely simplified.”

Fleetwood says that despite the simplification of contracts there is still a “huge amount” of work that needs to be done by local authority legal teams in terms of getting the LEPs up and running and in closing contracts. He says that it depends on the resource of in-house legal teams within local authorities as to how much support outside law firms need to give. “The issue now for me is the competitive dialogue between a local authority’s legal team and the private sector, which can often take two years.”

A year to remember

Tim Byles, the chief executive of PfS, admits that it 2009 has been a “challenging year” but claims that that the BSF programme is “running ahead of target” for financial closures and the number of schools open.

“Building Schools for the Future is in good shape,” he says. “This is partly because it is more accessible to financial institutions in this market because the deals are small and because the involvement of the European Bank, interest payments are kept low.”

Byles also says that he is confident that all the main political parties remain committed to investing in the schools estate. “There are 85 live local authorities in BSF at the moment, contracts are signed and I don’t imagine any government wanting to change these contracts which run to 2017,” he adds.

This rosy view is not shared by all interested observers of the BSF programme. Andrea Squires a partner at law firm Winckworth Sherwood is currently working on a number of BSF projects and thinks that there are a fewer number of bids coming through from private contractors for the schemes.

“It is about supply and demand,” she says. “There are a lot of schemes, but only so many bidders who can take on that size of scheme and establish the links they need with local authorities,” she explains. “Partnerships for Schools have done a fantastic job so far in terms of the programme but the Conservatives have a policy of decentralisation and empowering local authorities to service their own needs which could affect the future role of PfS,” she warns.

The Conservative approach

Ms Squires anticipates under a Tory government the programme will continue in some form but that PfS will become a “facilitator rather than a gatekeeper” for BSF.

Francis Maude and Michael Gove, shadow education secretary, are understood to be keen to emulate the Swedish model of education, which allows individuals and groups to set up their own schools independent of council control.

They have also highlighted Swedish schools built in disused offices and rented facilities as models for cheaper school-building in the UK. However, putting such plans into practice could require reform of building regulations, health and safety and disability access rules, and planning law.

So despite the problems that it has experienced, Squires thinks that it would “very difficult” for a future government to turn away from BSF.  “Huge amounts of money have gone into this and the real value will only be seen when the new facilities help deliver better educational achievement,” she says.

Helen Mooney is a freelance journalist.