Education Secretary Michael Gove claimed MPs and council chiefs had congratulated him. (From The Northern Echo)

Education Secretary Michael Gove claimed MPs and council chiefs had congratulated him.

9:04am Thursday 29th July 2010 in

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THE row over the doomed school rebuilding programme took a bizarre twist yesterday, when Education Secretary Michael Gove claimed MPs and council chiefs had congratulated him for scrapping it.

The Mr Gove said he had received many letters reading: “Thank you for ending Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – it was a total waste of our time.”

The claim, in evidence to the education select committee, came as Mr Gove cast further gloom on whether any new cash would be available for schools missing out.

He suggested none of the 735 rebuilding schemes he axed – including at 79 secondary schools in the North- East – could be afforded under capital investment plans put forward by both the Conservatives and Labour.

And, asked to send a positive message to teachers and parents at those schools, he replied that Labour’s promises were “unsustainable”.

More cash would be diverted to primary schools, Mr Gove said. Meanwhile, a review has been asked to find funds for creating new “free”

schools, sponsored by teachers and parents.

The shock decision to dismantle the BSF programme hit Darlington (seven schemes axed), County Durham (15), Stockton (17), Redcar and Cleveland (15), Hartlepool (six), Sunderland (14) and Gateshead/South Tyneside (five).

In Darlington, council leaders pleaded with Mr Gove to recognise that detailed planning work to revamp three ageing secondaries – Longfield, Branksome and Hurworth – was near completion.

But Mr Gove told MPs: “One of the things I have been struck by is that, in the letters I have received, from MPs, local authorities and others, many have said, ‘we are sorry our schools aren’t going ahead, but thank you for ending Building Schools for the Future. The waste, the bureaucracy – it was a total waste of our time and an immensely frustrating process. Please put something simpler in its place’.”

Mr Gove stressed that some capital investment would continue, but pointed to evidence suggesting that only schools in a state of “dilapidation”

suffered poorer exam results as a consequence.

The Education Secretary said he had axed about half of rebuilding schemes because Labour had planned to cut capital spending by 50 per cent – plans his Government was now matching.

And he rejected claims, made a day earlier by Tim Byles, head of the Partnerships for Schools agency, that the BSF programme was efficient, with falling costs, insisting it was “bureaucratic”.

Mr Gove added: “It was almost a conspiracy against the public, to prevent them understanding what was going on.”

But he was forced to apologise for wrongly claiming that a BSF school had to be rebuilt because its “corridors were too narrow” – accepting the school had been constructed under a different programme.

■ Mr Gove was speaking as a think-tank suggested local authorities should step in to fill the funding gap in public building projects.

With state investment in such schemes expected to fall by 50 per cent over four years, £12bn of building projects are under threat, said the New Local Government Network.

It urged local authorities to plug the shortfall by using alternative sources of funds.