PMQs sketch: Raac city, b*tch

Wednesday 06 September 2023 2:00 pm

If there was ever an evocative symbol of so-called Broken Britain, it is the image of school children turning up on the first day of term to a building at risk of crumbling.

It is a problem close to the heart of Rishi Sunak, as he looked warily at the groaning ceiling of Parliament during Prime Minister’s Question time today, with its long-delayed refurbishments, and presumably hopes that if a chunk does fall, it happens in a far off room, away from TV cameras and the potty-mouthed Gillian Keegan.

It certainly won’t be happening in the swish new £34m office for the Department for Education, Sir Keir Starmer was delighted to point out as he reeled off a list of schools impacted by the cheap 1950s building material known as reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac).

Even with the back-to-school jitters, Sunak did well to deflect Starmer’s roll call of all of the schools the Labour Party once planned to rebuild, and all the ones he hadn’t given new funding for during his time as Chancellor. There’s little the Prime Minister loves better than waxing lyrical on spending reviews and budgets past.

“Let me just walk him through the facts, of actually just what that spending review did,” the PM declared, donning his favourite cap – the smug and fastidiousness middle manager in HMRC.

“Funding for school maintenance and rebuilding will average £26bn a year over this Parliament as a result of that spending review… a 20 per cent increase on the years before.”

But his precision slipped as he accused the Labour leader of never bringing up the issue of Raac before, when the most cursory of searches found a reference to crumbling school buildings from earlier in the summer.

“He claims to be a man of detail, there are a hundred parliamentary questions from this side on this issue and an opposition day motion,” retorted Starmer, gesticulating at his newly assembled front bench, before he continued down the list of schools.

And going in for the kill, Starmed laid the blame for the schools crisis at the foot of the door of the “cowboys running the country”, a line likely to stick as the empty classrooms are filled with the tumbleweed of a classic Western.

His own punctiliousness under threat, Sunak leaned on his new friends at National Audit Office. “The NAO found that the Labour rebuilding program excluded 80 per cent of schools, it was a third more expensive than it needed to be and needlessly wasted resources,” he said.

“Time consuming and expensive,” Sunak yelled, drawing himself up as high as he could, “just like the Labour party.”