A taskforce established by the coalition government to draw up plans for a new schools building programme is set to tell ministers they can build every school they want to with the cash available, a source has told Construction News.
The government-commissioned task force is led by Sebastian James, operations director of DSG International, the group that owns Dixons, Currys and PC world. It is thought to believe that a radical overhaul of procurement and construction methods could slash costs dramatically.
The Capital Review team is expected to advise ministers they could resurrect plans to work on every secondary school in England despite the spending cuts.
It is due to submit an interim report to education secretary Michael Gove, timed to inform next month’s Comprehensive Spending Review. The interim report is expected to recommend a reliance on off-site manufacturing of standardized modules.
The details of the review team’s thinking on how off-site construction will work in practice will be included in a final report towards the end of the year.
The Capital Review team was set up by Micheal Gove MP in July to guide spending decisions over the next four financial years. Although purse strings will inevitably be tight after the CSR, there is still a huge need for education estate renewal in the UK.
A source close to the review team said: “All the schools the government wants to build can be built with the money available.
The source told Construction News: “The government needs to start all over again. Everything was wrong about BSF. The country was in the hands of immense incompetence.”
When the BSF scheme was scrapped in July, 715 school projects were halted, of which nearly 180 were projected to be new build, 319 remodelled or refurbished, 63 ICT-only and 153 had unconfirmed plans.
More than 2,000 schools were further back in the pipeline and would have been worked on by 2023. The £55bn BSF scheme aimed to rebuild or refurbish every state secondary school in England by 2023.
Much of the new wave of work is expected to be procured through the existing £4 bn academies framework. Schools delivery body Partnerships for Schools has a panel of 15 firms across two regions on its academies “super framework”.
Balfour Beatty, Bam Construct, Bovis Lend Lease, Carillion, Interserve, Kier, Sir Robert McAlpine, Wates and Willmott Dixon made both lists. They are joined in the North and Midlands by Clugston, Shepherd and Vinci; and in the South by Apollo, JB Leadbitter and Rydon.
