SHARON HODGSON MP: Crumbling schools in a concrete crisis of the Tories’ own creation

​ After the pandemic and the disruption to learning it caused, it is incredibly disappointing that more young people will miss more face-to-face teaching due to prolonged Government negligence of public services.

Alongside schools, many buildings across the UK have been found to have RAAC, hospitals, local council buildings, even the Houses of Parliament. All will need rectifying. This crisis is a symptom of prolonged austerity and what happens when short-sighted decisions are taken, such as scrapping Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme by the incoming Conservative Government in 2010.

Today we are facing the longest NHS waiting lists in history, police forces cut to the bone, care services unable to deliver for patients, and public transport links disappearing. This is reality after 13 years of Conservative rule. 70-year-old crumbling concrete is just the next crisis our public services are left to fight on their shoestring budgets.

Just a couple of months before the RAAC scandal hit the press, Mr Sunak donated £3 Million of his own personal wealth to private university Claremont McKenna College in California. While our schools crumble, our Prime Minister chooses to pour his wealth into elite education abroad. Furthermore, on the same day Mr Sunak as Chancellor cut funding to rebuild our schools, he cut taxes on Champagne. This government is completely out of touch. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan infamously complained to the press that nobody was giving her enough credit, but it is difficult to empathise with ministers demanding high praise for doing little more than managing a crisis of their own creation.