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If we look back at the history of Building Schools for the Future, the whole process to my mind was misconceived
Education secretary Michael Gove
Michael Gove has said people have thanked him for cancelling the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme, despite the confusion created by the botched announcement.
Appearing before the Commons education committee this morning, the education secretary told MPs he had been "struck" by the number of supportive letters from MPs, local authorities and others.
The education secretary said he had recieved letters that said: "We're sorry our school isn’t going ahead, but thank you for ending BSF, the waste, the bureaucracy, it was a total waste of our time and an immensely frustrating process, please put something simpler in place'."
Gove said he had sought to provide accurate information to the Commons but admitted there had been some "regrettable errors" and once again said he took ultimate responsibly for the mistakes.
"I sought before making my statement that the accuracy what is said to the House was as accurate as possible," he said.
Gove was forced to apologise to the House of Commons after his department published an error-strewn list of school building projects that are to be cancelled, leading some schools to believe their schemes were safe when they were not.
And he told the committee he had not taken the decision to cancel the scheme lightly.
"I do want a system that is significantly more cost effective, when I made the announcement on July 5 I did so after a great deal of thought, it wasn’t an easy announcement of make, inevitably I was in the process of disappointing hopes."
He added: "I didn’t take that decision with any amount of any relish."
"If we look back at the history of Building Schools for the Future, the whole process to my mind was misconceived".
Appearing before the same committee yesterday, Tom Byles, the chief executive of the body responsible for implementing the BSF programme said Gove's department had failed to check the lists were accurate before publication.
But Gove avoided criticising Byles, praising him as a "highly professional" executive.
"I don’t think any anyone would deny that the process has been intensely bureaucratic.
"Tim Byles has been a highly professional executive of Partnerships for Schools who worked within a framework laid down by the previous government.
Defending his decision to scrap the programme, he said no one would deny that the process was "intensely bureaucratic".
"I understand there will be people heartbroken by the decision, but the decision was taken my me saying 'we need to draw the line here."
And he said much of the confusion in the country about which school building projects were to be scrapped was down to the complicated nature of the BSF scheme itself.
"It is an inherently confusing system, not of our design, therefore moving away from it will involve confusion.
"Prior to this there we lots of local authorities in a state of confusion about how Building Schools for the Future worked."
He added: "There are lots of people who found the process inevitably bewildering."
Appearing alongside Gove, the civil servant in charge of the education department acknowledged that Byles had warned his department that there was a risk of errors in the list and it may be worth checking with local authorities.
But he said that at "no point" during that conversation was the risk that schools would be misclassified and therefore mistakenly told their projects would be saved identified.
And he said officials did not advise Gove of the option of checking with local authorities whether the data was correct, as they believed those kind of errors were capable of being checked without the local authority.
He told MPs: "I think it was a mistake not to put to the secretary of state the possibility of checking the data with the local authorities. As permanent secretary I'm ultimately responsible for the policy advice that goes to the secretary of state so I take responsibility for that."
"One of the tasks for us now is to take stock, learn lessons and hopefully this sort of thing won't happen again," he added.
Article Comments
I won't be thanking him, I think it was a very shortsighted and unjustified measure. Bureaucracy should be a necessary part of handing out Government funding. Putting in a simpler process is not the same as cancelling funding for school building projects. At the moment that is all that Gove has done.
Malcolm Parker
29th Jul 2010 at 2:42 am
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