Council to fix school heating amid fears ‘pupils aren’t safe’
COUNCIL bosses are stepping in to repair an academy with a dysfunctional heating system because they fear ‘pupils aren’t safe.’
Oldham town hall has agreed to use its own sub-contractor and fund works at Blessed John Henry Newman College, a Catholic secondary school on Broadway.
The new-build school was completed in 2012 under a partnership between the council and a PFI contractor owned by Balfour Beatty, as part of the national ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme.
However, a town hall report says following its completion, ‘several building defects became apparent.’
These included issues with the heating system, roof leaks in the atrium area and an inability to control temperatures in certain rooms due to a ‘variety of factors.’
At a cabinet meeting, Coun Abdul Jabbar, portfolio holder for finance, said the school had cost £32m to build and was the ‘most expensive school anywhere in the borough.’ He added: “So of course we expected it to have all the facilities working properly. It’s got to a stage where really we feel that we have to take control of the situation. This was a very expensive school to begin with, so for us to be saddled with this kind of problem is completely unacceptable.”
He said deputy chief executive Helen Lockwood had been working to resolve the problem, but numerous meetings had not resulted in it being sorted out.
Coun Jabbar said: “It’s got to a stage where really we are not confident that our children will be safe in there, so this is why we made this decision. For the sake of our children this needs to be resolved and it needs to be resolved right now.”
In 2016, Balfour Beatty sold its majority shareholding in the Oldham BSF Limited company to an investment fund within the Amber Infrastructure Group.
Since the school opened in 2012, the day-to-day operational management has been undertaken by Engie Limited, who were subcontracted to provide facilities management. Work was undertaken to improve the heating system between 2015 and 2017.
And in late 2017, Oldham BSF Limited committed to undertake and finance remedial works to improve the system.
But in April last year, the council was informed that the company was ‘no longer prepared to finance the works’ until the outcome of an adjudication with its subcontractors was known, which would have established liability for the rectification works. The decision has been ‘repeatedly delayed’ from last summer, to this month, according to the council.
The report states that the head and governors at the school are ‘extremely frustrated’ at how long the problems have gone on for, and the ‘inability of various partners to remedy.’
The council has been deducting money from the monthly unitary charge that it pays to the contractor. It has commissioned an external contractor to carry out a full investigation and has set out the required actions of the PFI contractor from this month onwards.