Peter Grimes in the comments notes the Today programme’s disgracefully one-sided and highly misleading account (08:32) of the causes of the closure of 17 schools in Scotland due to structural failures. Listening to the report you would have come away with the impression that the school structural failures were possibly all due to austerity and Michael Gove.
The schools were built in 2005...
Edinburgh council chiefs have ordered the closure of 17 schools following safety fears over their construction. The schools were built under the PPP1 private finance initiative by the Edinburgh Schools Partnership (ESP).
Construction of the schools under the £360m deal was completed in 2005.
In other words under Labour’s care and mentality.
The BBC knows this and has reported the age of the buildings…
The closure of the schools, which are about 10 years old, was prompted after workers repairing serious structural issues at one city primary found “further serious defects” with the building on Friday.
Which makes it hard to understand how the BBC’s flagship political programme allowed the SNP’s pro-independence stooge, Malcolm Fraser, to blame the schools’ building defects on the Government and Michael Gove in particular who he quoted as saying ‘I’m not here to make architects rich’…the implication being that this careful use of resources has led to the failure….not enough money rather than the architect’s incompetence or the builder’s dodgy practices.
Fraser was the former deputy chair of Architecture and Design Scotland, the Scottish government’s design and build advisory body and is pro-independence and so has a distinct interest in pointing the finger of blame towards the Tories.
Mishal Husain, despite noting that Fraser resigned in 2007 because of concerns about the buildings, happily allowed him to spin his left-wing narrative about bankers and lawyers and the country being more concerned with financial processes than in building beautiful things….then getting on to Gove…only here, apparently, to make bankers and lawyers rich….Fraser tells us that architects care about these buildings and put their care and attention into them…well clearly not despite the huge, and ruinous, financing of the 2005 schools under PFI….how can he blame a shortage of cash?
Mishal Husain chips in and adds to his leftwing narrative by saying that part of the problem maybe that the desire for value for money is so paramount. A less than subtle attack on austerity and the Tories. Curiously the real reason Fraser resigned in 2007 was because…the financing was not value for money….he believes that PPP was “fundamentally flawed”….
It’s extraordinary how everybody seems to be of the opinion that PPP is not value for money, but nobody talks about it.
Fraser, who has consistently argued for a value–for–money review of the PPP process, wrote to Raymond Young in September expressing his disappointment that A+DS had made no progress on a PPP review.
“Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that PFI/PPP procurement routes produce buildings that are more expensive, take longer to build and are significantly-poorer in quality than those procured by more traditional routes. Against this PFI/PPP has the single “advantage” of allowing the Chancellor [Gordon Brown] to defer payment for such crucial infrastructure, thus reducing his Public Sector Borrowing Requirement but putting us all “in hock” for decades” wrote Fraser.
If the buildings were more expensive than if procured by traditional routes that makes Fraser’s final message today somewhat ironic…perhaps we should pay our architects more in order to deliver environments where people learn better and have more alert, better educated children, that seems like a good investment.
Hmmm…that all sounds wonderful…but why did Husain not ask him why his own architectural practice closed down…the BBC reported on it last year after all…
Mr Fraser said: “The work we did is beautiful and important. However we have been unable to make it profitable.”
So he expects the government to stump up huge amounts of cash to make buildings beautiful but not ‘value for money’, or does he want ‘value for money’?, I’m confused, and yet he himself isn’t prepared to do the same and subsidise his artistic ambitions…having sacked 15 staff.
Any thoughts that he is panhandling for government handouts to subsidise architects’ flights of fancy? Maybe we could have seen his true motivation for his comments on the Today programme had we known more about his background.
And on the subject of ruinously expensive PFI type funding of buildings…and topically, ones funded by companies based in the Caymans apparently…
The BBC could also address why their Pacific Quay HQ in Glasgow is leased for £100 million from a hidden ownership company in the Cayman Islands.
So what of the BBC’s own building at Pacific Quays in Glasgow?
BBC funding doubts and who owns BBC Scotland HQ?
Last week in a little known announcement, Moody’s, the agency that stripped the UK of its AAA credit rating, cut the ratings of three property companies that lease buildings to the BBC in London and Glasgow.
The three companies which were downgraded were Juturna PLC, Pacific Quay Finance and White City Property Finance, which all went down from Aa3 to A1. The companies finance buildings for which the BBC is the sole occupier and Moody’s believes there is now doubt over whether the BBC can meet future financial obligations.
The news prompted Newsnet Scotland to look into who owns the property occupied by BBC Scotland at Pacific Quay. The result of our research is that quite frankly we don’t know. Information to hand indicates that it is not the BBC, but this will not stop the licence payers paying dearly for it over a period of thirty years.
For some of the background to the structured finance vehicles used by the BBC we can turn to the National Audit Office report dated November 30th, 2009 entitled “the BBC’s management of three major estate projects”.
The report is highly critical of the BBC’s management of the projects and concludes, amongst other things, that “The BBC is not well placed to demonstrate value for money from the £2,000 million it has committed to spending on the three projects over their life”.
Here we have the magic of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in action.
PFI was the Brown/Darling conjuring trick that swept vast amounts of public sector debt under the carpet where it could be hidden until it eventually emerged to grab us by the throat. The same PFI debt that extracts hundreds of millions of pounds annually out of Scotland’s health and education budgets, before a single nurse or teacher has been paid.
Guess somebody’s not happy…still, I’m sure the building is beautiful and provides an environment where the BBC staff can feel loved, alert and productive.
Education is a Devolved department solely under the control of the Scottish Parliament since, I think, 1998/99. If I recall correctly, the Scottish Government in that time has been mostly Labour Coalition or SNP led, has it not?
The BBC should really know things like that.
Of course they do, but…………….
Clever. The BBC have really been honing their smear and innuendo skills this last week, together with their ability to timeshift responsibility – teleporting the nasty Mr Gove back in time to 2005.
All this left me wondering what this piece was all about? Was it really the closure of the schools in Scotland? because that really didn’t get discussed…or was it simply a vehicle to invite along a known, long standing left wing critic of the Government to have yet another go at the Tories?
Any excuse.
Note to Alan – can you please post the duration time of the sound clip you’re referring to rather than the time it was broadcast. You posted “(08:32)” for the Today link. For us plebs who would interpret that as 8 minutes and 32 seconds, who don’t get to listen to the Today programme as it is broadcast, you need to state 02:32 (two hours and thirty two minutes into the programme).
Whatever happened to the art of communication?
Anyway, I agree. This is what pisses me off about the BBC. They will always – without fail – associate a failed government project with the ‘private sector’. It happened during the London Olympics with Serco. We get it all the time on local BBC radio.
But you can bet your life, any private sector company that benefits from taxpayer monies will be campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU.