Status Anxiety: The great BSF scandal

Government reports don’t often make scintillating reading. But the Review of Education Capital by Sebastian James is an exception. Colloquially known as the James Review, it’s an investigation into Building Schools for the Future, a programme of capital expenditure on schools overseen by the last government. It also contains various proposals as to how education capital might be better spent in future.

Sebastian James is the group operations director of Dixons Retail and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that he’s appalled by the level of inefficiency and waste he uncovered. You would expect this to lead to eye-popping rage — after all, it’s taxpayers’ money that has been going up in smoke — but the tone of the report is closer to existential despair. From a successful businessman’s point of view, the wrongheadedness of the last government’s approach to capital expenditure was on such a massive scale that it goes beyond anything likely to result in frustration or anger.

As with so many government initiatives, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. The idea behind the BSF programme was to refurbish England’s crumbling secondary school estate. It was initially costed at £45 billion, but this was revised upwards to £55 billion as the completion date stretched ever further into the future. By the time Labour left office, £8.65 billion had been spent with some 310 schools benefiting from BSF investment. That’s an average cost per school of approximately £28 million. That’s 20 per cent higher than it costs to rebuild a school in Denmark, 25 per cent higher than in Sweden and 40 per cent higher than in Ireland.

Why did BSF schools cost so much? For one thing, the process of applying for funding was needlessly bureaucratic.