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 building new free schools was a greater funding priority, 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.”
Sunak hit back, saying it was “completely and utterly wrong” to suggest he was to blame for failing to fully fund the rebuilding programme.
In his first public comments since the crisis escalated over the weekend, the prime minister said “new information came to light relatively recently” and the government “acted on it as swiftly as possible”.
Sunak acknowledged “the timing is frustrating” for parents preparing to send their children back to school for the autumn. But he added: “There are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.”
