It is now a year since the short, disastrous premiership of Liz Truss. But when Rishi Sunak entered the House of Commons on Wednesday, politics at Westminster seemed just as disconnected from reality as during her chaotic 50-day tenure inside No 10.
Tory backbenchers and ministers greeted Sunak, after their long summer break, with customary roars as he took his seat for prime minister’s questions. The more difficulty their leader is in these days, the more noise they seem to make.
Quite why they were in such good voices must have been a mystery to any objective onlooker. In the week when pupils returned to class for the new school year, the government had just shamefacedly published a list of 147 state schools in England whose buildings were in danger of collapsing (having previously refused to name those affected).
Many of the schools are in Tory constituencies. Classrooms, assembly halls, dining rooms and corridors were cordoned off before term began, and returning children found themselves shunted into temporary “safe spaces”, wherever these could be found.
George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor and architect of austerity, used to accuse his Labour predecessors of “failing to mend the roof while the sun was shining”. But after 13 years of the cost-cutting he initiated, much of the school estate is in danger of total collapse. Former civil servants said the fault lay with politicians who wanted to save money rather than pay for repairs. As policy disasters go, it was up there with the worst.
Other stories last week added to the impression of national malaise.
Hours before the list of crumbling schools was made public, terror suspect Daniel Khalife had gone on the run, having escaped from Wandsworth prison on the underside of a delivery van.
Staff shortages and cuts to prison budgets were blamed. Questions were asked about why Khalife had been in a category B prison given the offences he is suspected of having committed. Was it cost-cutting, lack of staff or a system failure that had allowed this modern version of a “great escape”?
Then, as if the bad news agenda was not packed enough, Birmingham City Council – one of the biggest local authorities in the UK – announced that it had in effect declared itself bankrupt. Experts piled in to warn that many other councils across England were now living “hand to mouth” after 13 years of cost cutting. Was the country falling apart?
In the Commons Sunak, like his backbenchers, had given up on trying to make coherent arguments. Attempts at policy “resets” over the summer on health, immigration, schools had all flopped.
All he and they could do was shout louder, deny, dislocate from reality, and make out all was well.
“The Conservatives are getting on delivering for Britain!” the prime minister yelled. Before sitting down, he drew more cheers by accusing Keir Starmer of political opportunism for having had the cheek to raise the safety of schools as an issue in the first place.
When the political party conference season opens later this month, Sunak will hope that the prospects of inflation falling and a more stable economic outlook will somehow kickstart a Tory revival in time for a general election in a year or so.
But despite their shows of bravado in the Commons, few Conservative MPs really see much hope. Their party’s poll ratings have not declined markedly over the summer but neither have they showed any sign of improving, despite endless initiatives aimed at shifting the dial.
Conservative attempts to focus on “small boats” merely raised the issue more in the public consciousness and the overall effect on their ratings was negative, suggesting that even immigration is no longer a plus for them.
As they returned to the Commons last week, Tory MPs were, privately, gloomy.
“Six months ago, if you had asked, I would have told you we were in the game,” said one in a marginal “red wall” seat. “Now I think it has gone. I think the electorate as a whole has made up its mind. We don’t have anything to say on the doorstep.”
That “doorstep question” is raised by many worried Conservatives. What can they say after almost a decade and a half? Where is the story that can make sense of their three terms?
In 2010, when David Cameron and Osborne, with the help of Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems, ushered in austerity, they presented it as a short period of necessary pain that had to be forced on the country to put the public finances right.
Instead, today, the images and experiences are of under-resourced services and a general decline resulting from chronic, systematic lack of investment.
During the first term of Tory rule, austerity often went hand in glove with ideological arguments about creating a smaller state. But here, too, as Conservative MPs search for positive stories, there is instead evidence of mismanagement in pursuit of those ideological visions.
As we reveal today, some of the problems now coming to light in school buildings are in Michael Gove’s “free schools”, where buildings were approved without proper checks being carried out, to increase the numbers operating outside local authority control.
The Observer has uncovered evidence that the government was in such a rush to open new free schools in England that it was buying up old buildings – many built in the immediate postwar era, using aerated concrete and asbestos.
One free school on the government’s new list of 147 schools with confirmed Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) is Northampton International Academy. When it opened in 2017, pupils had to work in temporary classrooms backing on to an area known for drug dealing as the former Royal Mail sorting office was refurbished to accommodate them. The project cost £40m, £10m over budget, which was blamed on “insufficient surveys” before the site was initially approved. Now the government has ordered the school to close part of the site because of fears that the roof isn’t safe.
In 2014, an air traffic control training centre by Bournemouth airport was bought to house another free school, Parkfield, after a four-page vendor’s report. Asbestos and bats were later found on the site and unexploded bombs have yet to be ruled out. Half of the buildings on the site were demolished because they were unsuitable, and local media estimates the cost at £35m.
Typically the Department for Education (DfE) closely guards all information about pre-purchase surveys on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. But the Observer has evidence of 13 free schools where only light-touch surveys – in some cases recommending further tests for possible Raac – were carried out before sites were bought.
The government’s education and skills funding agency (ESFA) revealed in a freedom of information request that often it just “isn’t practical to do an intrusive survey” before buying a building for a free school. But funding consultant Tim Warneford, says: “That’s just rubbish.”
He compares the situation to a normal house purchase. Typically, buyers don’t trust a vendor’s survey, so commission their own detailed one. “You understandably want a full survey, especially with an older place, to give you reassurance but also some leverage to negotiate on price,” he says.
Following Michael Gove’s scrapping of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010, Warneford says there is ample evidence that the government paid “well over the odds” for derelict buildings to house its new free schools, and he is angrier still that its failure to have thorough surveys done first has led, in some cases, to millions of pounds of extra expense.
Another difficulty for Tories on the doorsteps is what to say about “levelling up”, the post-austerity vision for a more equal country. After the 2019 election, when the Conservatives won dozens of seats from Labour in the north of England and Midlands, Boris Johnson promised to “level up” the country in order to repay the faith of the new Tory voters. After the pandemic he repackaged the message and talked of “building back better”.
Large parts of the north and Midlands have seen precisely nothing in the way of levelling up, however. Birmingham City Council is not alone in being on the brink of bankruptcy and by no means all the authorities facing similar difficulties are Labour led. Since 2010 real-terms funding by central government has fallen by more than 40%.
Bradford Council’s director of finance, Christopher Kinsella, recently presented a report on the authority’s first quarter finances in which he painted a dire picture for it and many others in the region.
“Many councils are experiencing similar pressures across the country as a result of these systemic funding issues, and numerous councils are nearing Section 114 notices [meaning no new expenditure is permitted]. This is without precedent and reflective of a sector in dire need of support.”
A half an hour’s drive south of Bradford City Hall lies the town of Huddersfield, headquarters of Kirklees metropolitan borough.
On Wednesday afternoon there will be a full meeting of Kirklees Council, and it will not be a comfortable one. Councillor Cathy Scott is the interim leader of the 69-strong authority. “Since the Conservatives entered government in 2010, Kirklees has lost over a billion pounds in funding,” she says. “Our annual budget has pretty much been cut in half – over £200m a year lost – while demand for services has increased significantly.
“The cuts to local government have been huge. But it isn’t just about the amount of funding they have cut nationally – it is that they have redistributed it from areas that need it to places they want to have it. That isn’t levelling up. The Tories have levelled down our communities.”
Pressures are acute across the region. Four schools in Bradford are affected by the Raac crisis and the state of public transport is a constant source of anger. In March this year, train operator Northern made a swathe of cuts to services. Just under two years ago the government scrapped plans for a much-anticipated high-speed rail link connecting Leeds and Manchester.
At Leeds’s Armley Prison, a huge redbrick edifice opened in 1847, an HM Inspector of Prisons report this July said: “HMP Leeds remains an overcrowded inner-city Victorian reception prison holding just under 1,110 adult prisoners. When we last inspected in 2022, we found a prison that needed to be safer and to provide more meaningful activity for prisoners. In particular, we were concerned about the high number of prisoners who had taken their own lives.”
Next June marks 10 years since the launch of the original northern powerhouse, an economic mission by Osborne to drive up productivity in the north and tackle entrenched regional divides.
After Osborne left office in 2016, business and civic leaders set up the Northern Powerhouse Partnership (NPP), chaired by him and intended to act as a voice for the region’s public and private sectors and to hold government to account on its promise to tackle the north-south divide.
NPP analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics has found that northerners earn on average £8,400 a year less than Londoners, and that the north’s productivity is roughly 40% lower than that of London and the south-east.
Whether it is austerity, the rolling back of the state or, more latterly, promises to level up the country, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where the Tories can claim to have really delivered.
In Kirklees, Scott put it like this: “Levelling up isn’t just a meaningless slogan. It has become a cruel joke at our expense.”
The road to Raac and ruin
2010: The coalition launches its austerity programme
After winning the May election, the Tory/Lib Dem coalition launched a period of “austerity”, saying that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the UK could face financial ruin without it. “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity,” said prime minister David Cameron. George Osborne called for cuts of up to 40% in departmental budgets, ushering in a period in which ministers were judged according to how much spending they could slash.
2010: Building Schools for the Future axed
In one of his first acts as education secretary, Michael Gove axed the Labour government’s school rebuilding programme, Building Schools for the Future. Gove said he believed there was little evidence that new school buildings improved standards. He argued that Building Schools for the Future had been beset by “massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy”. The decision caused a huge row, including with some Tory MPs who had been promised new school buildings in their areas. No substantial rebuilding plan was put in its place.
2010-15: The drive towards academies and free schools
New Labour began the experiment with academies. When Michael Gove became education secretary, he turbocharged the project in line with his ideological aim of shrinking the state. Outside local authority control, academies are funded directly by government. Gove also introduced his pet project, “free schools”, which could be set up by charities, universities, community and faith groups or parents. The rush to do this led to many being set up in old buildings before proper checks were done.
2016: Brexit
The decision to leave the EU has, according to most respected economists, left the country with a smaller economy than would otherwise have been the case, leaving less to be spent on public services. The 2016 referendum result also means economic growth will be 4% lower than had the UK stayed in the single market and customs union. Less economic activity means less revenue to the Treasury and less money to spend on the public realm such as repairing schools built with crumbling concrete.
2019-2023: Levelling up
After Boris Johnson led the Tories to victory in 2019 and won dozens of seats from Labour in the north of England and Midlands, he promised to repay those who had switched sides by “levelling up” the country, and investing more in its less wealthy areas. Since then, the levelling-up agenda has been a bitter disappointment to many Conservative MPs as promised projects, including transport improvements, have been cancelled or delayed due to cost cutting.
