Schools were ‘left unsafe as corners cut to save money’
MSPs told of ‘horrendous’ building programme
SCHOOL buildings have been left unsafe because private finance contractors ‘cut corners’ to save money, council chiefs have admitted.
The taxpayer is locked into contracts lasting decades and costing billions of pounds under the Public Private Partnership scheme.
Holyrood’s education committee is probing why the infrastructure of primaries and secondaries built and maintained under PPP is now carrying defects, some potentially lethal.
It came as a City of Edinburgh Council official revealed that five more schools have faulty walls.
Yesterday Aberdeenshire Council’s head of facilities management, Allan Whyte, told MSPs the construction programme around ten to 15 years ago had been ‘horrendous’.
He said: ‘It was a new concept, it moved away from traditional designand-build… contractors would appear to have been given free rein, rightly or wrongly.’
Asked by Nationalist MSP Colin Beattie if PPP contractors had cut corners, Mr Whyte replied: ‘There’s no doubt about that. Were they deliberately? It would appear so, yes.’
Danny Lowe , director of housing and technical resources at South Lanarkshire Council, said: ‘At that time there was a huge volume of work going on across the country, which puts added pressures on contractors in terms of speed and getting things moving, which I think could be a contributory factor.’
The damning testimony comes only days after the conclusion of nine days of evidence in a fatal accident inquiry into the death of Keane Wallis-Bennett, 12, who died in 2014 when a wall at Liberton High School, Edinburgh, collapsed on her. A verdict is expected later this year.
The committee’s inquiry followed the collapse of masonry into a playground at Oxgangs Primary in Edinburgh last year.
City of Edinburgh Council shut the school and 16 others built under the first wave of PPP between 2002 and 2005, pending inspections and remedial work that affected the education of 8,000 pupils for several months.
Ministers ordered councils to checks their own estates, which uncovered defects in buildings.
Aberdeenshire identified ‘structural anomalies’ at five schools which will be fixed this summer as they are not as serious as those found in Edinburgh and pose ‘no immediate risk’.
Peter Watton, Edinburgh City Council’s head of facilities management, told the committee his authority’s PPP strategy had been a mistake. He said: ‘The council got it wrong.’
But committee convener, Nationalist MSP James Dornan, responded: ‘That’s not getting it wrong, that’s missing the whole point of what you were there to do. That’s not making a mistake, that’s making a huge error.’ Mr Watton admitted a further five non-PPP facilities – Currie, Towerbank and Cramond primaries, Queensferry High and Valley Park Community Centre – have faulty walls.
Nearly 300 schools have been built or refurbished under PPP since 1999. Payments to contractors will total £505million this year.
A spokesman for Robertson Group – Aberdeenshire Council’s ‘delivery partner’ in its early PPP schools – said: ‘At no time would Robertson deliberately cut corners. We carried out surveys on all our school buildings. Some minor remedial works were recommended but there is no immediate risk to structural safety.’
‘The council got it wrong’