A vast programme of rebuilding or refurbishing every secondary school in the country has wasted public money and been beset with planning problems, MPs say in a report today.
Officials spent more than £1 million on one consultant alone, despite hiring in-house experts, the influential Public Accounts Committee says.
The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project has over-run both schedule and budget. The budget rose from an estimated £45 billion to £55 billion, and the programme will not be completed until at least 2023, three years later than expected.
Even that target is ambitious, the report says, unless the programme leaders double their pace.
“The Department [for Children, Schools and Families] and Partnerships for Schools (which is overseeing BSF) appear complacent about the challenge of renewing all secondary schools by 2023,” the MPs say. “Current promises to increase the pace of the programme are not sufficient to meet this.”
Advertisement
The report says the two bodies wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in skills and resources. “The department should avoid making false economies in central administration,” it says.
The department’s persistent over-optimism had resulted in widespread disappointment with the programme’s progress, and reduced confidence in its ability to include all schools by 2023.
The report says: “Such over-optimism is systemic across the Civil Service’s planning of major projects and programmes.”
Partnerships for Schools is criticised for failing to provide local authorities with enough information to compare the price of each project. The report says most BSF schools will be procured without competitive tendering.
It describes an “inappropriate allocation of resources” and blames the two bodies for failing to test their assumptions against similar programmes. Had they done so they would have realised the plans were unachievable, it says.
Advertisement
Salary costs at Partnerships for Schools were double those of government BSF staff, the MPs say.
“Despite this high level of central resources, the department and Partnerships for Schools paid £11.1 million to private consultants up to March 2008,” the report says.
“They could have reduced this expenditure by planning the level of skills and resources required at the beginning of the programme, and ensuring that private consultants did not undertake work that could be done in-house.
“In perhaps one of the worst cases, the department did not foresee that it would need its own in-house commercial expertise to provide oversight of the programme.
“So instead of employing someone directly on a full-time basis, it became dependent on a single consultant and ended up paying £1.35 million to KPMG over three years for this person.”
Advertisement
Edward Leigh, the Conservative chairman of the committee, said: “Centralising the management of the programme has had benefits. But the department and Partnerships for Schools must dispel the air of complacency which surrounds them, by indicating in detail how they propose to speed up the pace of delivery and finish the programme on time.”
Tim Byles, chief executive of Partnerships for Schools, said it had recently adopted a new “streamlined approach to delivering the programme”.
He said: “This will see costs reducing by 30 per cent and further acceleration in the delivery timetable.
“As we have said for two years now, the early assumptions – made before the programme began – were over-optimistic. In 2005, new targets were set and since then BSF has met or exceeded the target for schools openings.”