A massive crisis – yet NOBODY will take any blame

IT is hard to overstate the crisis that has, last weekend and with scarcely 48 hours warning, shut so many Edinburgh schools, denied thousands and thousands of children their lessons (weeks before critical exams), dumped an almighty childcare crisis on the vast majority of their parents and humiliated the city council.

It all began one wild night in January when much of a high wall at Oxgangs Primary School – glitzy new premises completed only a few years ago – tumbled down.

Critical wall-ties – ‘header-ties’ securing the outer skin of bricks at the top to the steel infrastructure of the building – were missing or had failed – and this in a school completed under a controversial Public Finance Initiative scheme, along with 16 other Edinburgh academies, since the turn of the century.

It was tempting for many at once to assail PFI in principle and the outfit immediately responsible – the Edinburgh Schools Consortium, a lucrative operation including Miller Construction and the Bank of Scotland which, incredibly, owns the schools and is paid huge sums every year.

Yet we have strict planning permission procedures and rigorous building regulation control for a reason – to stop the erection of ugly buildings so atrociously built as to threaten people’s safety.

Where had the city council officials been – those men and women handsomely waged at public expense to supervise closely the construction of any building much more significant than a garden shed – before a completion certificate was issued attesting that all building regulations have been met?

We duly had the answer from the city council’s unblushing leader, Andrew Burns. ‘Design and the construction standards were the responsibility of the Edinburgh Schools Partnership, who were the main overarching contractor in effect for delivering the facilities,’ the Labour councillor said.

‘During the construction there was ongoing involvement from the council but the self-certification process that was there at the time, quite rightly, quite legally, quite properly, Edinburgh Schools Partnership self-certified to the council that the buildings were compliant with all the relevant building standards…’

This is breathtaking: the consortium in charge of enormous public works – a fat private concern, accountable only to shareholders – was allowed legally to pass its own workmanship.

No one actually elected to relevant public office – whether now, or in past and implicated administrations – has taken any responsibility.

Kezia Dugdale insists Scottish Labour has ‘nothing to apologise for, for building schools’.

Yet these 17 campuses were erected under a Labour or Labour/Liberal Democrat city council and such PFI terms were joyously embraced, not just by the Labour/Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive but, over many years, by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Given direct Lib Dem involvement, its demand this week for an inquiry is one they may regret.

Ruth Davidson, meanwhile, has jumped out to declare the Scottish Government bears culpability. But, at the time, the SNP was not in office; and it was Thatcher and Major who first came up with PFI and indeed road-tested it in Scotland: the very first PFI venture in Britain was the Skye Bridge. Scotland, with only 8.5 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, has 40 per cent of all its PFI schools. Why? And why is there so little public awareness of the terms involved?

PFI has created public debt of a near-incredible £222billion. The contract for the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary – another PFI triumph – lasts for 25 years, but the lease for the land it stands on was taken out for 130. Our greatgreat-grandchildren will be still be paying it, to rejoicing shareholders, in a century.

The Nationalists quickly tossed PFI in a skip and created the Scottish Futures Trust, on a nonprofit distribution (NPD) model. NPD means that the private entrepreneurs invest only in the debt of a project, not putting in any equity and not receiving returns on capital investment.

BUT this is not morally so different from PFI: still a mechanism whereby public works can be done on the short-term cheap and leaving it to future generations to pay the bill.

And – amidst a national election – the Scottish Government has but danced to pass the buck firmly back into the lap of the city council.

‘The safety of children, young people and staff in our schools is paramount, and I recognise the concern of parents. I am reassured by the prompt action taken by Edinburgh city council,’ says Angela Constance, Education Secretary and minister for gobbledygook. ‘We understand that all of the affected buildings in Edinburgh were completed over ten years ago. We will ensure that, as more information about the nature of the issue in Edinburgh is established, this is passed on to other local authorities to assist them in this process…’ Nothing to do with us, guvn’or.

But the sheer fogginess of all this – assorted businesses; Byzantine funding; lack of clear accountability; an alphabet-soup of PFI, NPD, PPP – does not merely hurt the head: it is dreadful for democracy.

Some commenters argue this is increasingly the future of public works in tax-avoidance Britain – money increasingly denied for things desperately needed, ‘forcing solutions that suit private contractors and let politicians of the hook’. More immediately, there is an excellent case, surely, for removing state schools from local authority control in the first place.

Jordanhill School – the only state school in Scotland which has never been run by a municipal council; it was till 1988 the ‘demonstration school’ of Jordanhill College of Education – is directly funded by the Scottish Government and run by a parent-elected board of managers.

Raw exam results, year after year, suggest it’s the best state school in the country and a house within its catchment has a £100,000 premium over a home yards away that isn’t.

But the unions, our main political parties and a Scottish public life generally clotted with Chardonnay socialists will never wear anything so sensible – any more than they can bear immediate responsibility for dodgy walls in Edinburgh.