It’s not just England’s schools that are crumbling. As the new term dawns, MPs have returned to Portcullis House to find work still ongoing to fix the building’s notoriously leaky roof. Water poured into the building’s atrium last month after a ‘huge bang’ which left the area fenced off with scaffolding underneath. A Freedom of Information request by Steerpike found that the annual cost of fixing the roof has now jumped to more than £10,000 over the past decade.
So what’s to be done about the building, which opened in 2000 and was expected to last, er, two centuries? Well, a major report into the Portcullis House roof defects is expected within the coming weeks, with MPs hoping that it will, at last, find a solution to the ongoing costs. It certainly ought to: according to a second FOI request by Mr S, the costs of that report now run to over £190,000.
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