Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR MICHAEL
BUCHANAN, MR
DAVID LLOYD
JONES, MS
ANGELA RAWSON,
MS JANET
NEWTON AND
MR ALLAN
JARVIS
24 MAY 2006
Q60 Chairman: What about David's
company?
Mr Lloyd Jones: In the last two
years we have been trying for the Queen's Award for the environment
and each time they have come back and found some reason why we
should not get it, but this third time round we are going to get
there.
Q61 Chairman: That includes the evaluation
of your own footprint?
Mr Lloyd Jones: Absolutely.
Q62 Chairman: Allan, you have been
talking about the future. What about the schools you have been
in. Have they attempted within the parameters that they are set
to measure their footprint on this planet?
Mr Jarvis: I think I can recall
two cases where they have done so. We certainly aim to do so in
the Bradford schools.
Q63 Chairman: Did you do it in the
schools in which you have worked in the past?
Mr Jarvis: No.
Q64 Chairman: Angela, you work for
an organisation. Do you measure your footprint in terms of the
building you are in, the company, the organisation you work in?
Ms Rawson: Within the county?
Q65 Chairman: Yes.
Ms Rawson: I think we operate
from a range of sites, some which are—
Q66 Chairman: You are being a bit
shifty here. These days people are saying, "What is your
personal footprint on this planet? What is your corporate footprint?
What is your family's footprint?" It is about time we started
thinking like that in relation to sustainability, surely?
Ms Rawson: Yes, but I think some
of the issues that have been raised about the costs of some of
this and where you decide to invest—
Q67 Chairman: We are not talking
about how expensive it is, whether you measure it. You cannot
improve unless you as a local authority measure what it is. If
you do not know what it is you cannot begin to improve it, can
you?
Ms Rawson: True.
Q68 Chairman: Janet.
Ms Newton: Personally I do not,
but I suspect there is a little man in County Hall who would know
all that information, because meeting Agenda 21 is one of the
corporate priorities for the county council.
Q69 Chairman: This is holistic, is
it not? We cannot sit here now saying nice things about sustainable
schools without talking about your procurement. You ought to be
checking on Michael and David for their BREEAM credentials before
you hire then, surely, if sustainable buildings is going to work?
Many companies are at the leading edge in this.
Ms Newton: They are indeed. Certainly
the preferred bidder that we have has made a significant commitment
to produce the most sustainable schools in the country. In terms
of the county council's approach, when I get back to County Hall
this afternoon, I shall enquire who has got the answer.
Q70 Chairman: It would be nice when
the Committee comes to your place, as we might do, to see outside
what is your carbon footprint. We would be very impressed by that.
Allan, one of the things we found on a very good school visit
on Thursday, a very good school—I will name it. It was the
Education Village in Darlington. The people there said, "We
started off with high aspirations for sustainability but a lot
of it was cut out because of cost." Is that going to happen
time and time again?
Mr Jarvis: It will happen if we
allow it to. It will happen if Partnerships for Schools adopts
a funding allocation model or continue to use a funding allocation
model for BSF that does not allow for addressing sustainability
issues where there is some upfront cost. If it is that important,
then it needs to be addressed through the funding allocation model,
DfES have to buy into it, Partnership for Schools have to buy
into it, local authorities have to be prepared to buy into it.
You need to get all those people on board and find the extra £500,000,
or whatever it might be, in upfront costs to make these solutions
affordable at the start of the project and, for example, under
a PFI scheme, allow for your return only coming towards the end
of the 25-year contract. Another thing you need to do, where you
are doing conventional design and build in BSF, and this comes
back to a question that was asked earlier on, you have got to
make sure that the same quality of outputs is achieved there:
so the same degree of sustainability in terms of design, in terms
of building performance, and that applies also to where you are
refurbishing rather than replacing buildings—the same imperatives
should be applied—but they will cost money in cases where
you are restoring and refurbishing existing buildings, they will
cost money anyway in terms of the upfront costs to put wind turbines
of worthwhile size on the roofs of buildings and in order to generate
a significant amount of the building's energy requirements.
Chairman: I want to move on now. Do not
feel affronted by the questions. If you are all game after this
meeting, we could go round to what I call the Eden Project, the
Department for Education and Skills, to see what their carbon
footprint is.
Q71 Stephen Williams: I want to ask
some questions about financing, perhaps starting off with Ms Newton,
as a surveyor. The Chairman mentioned at the start there was £45
billion of taxpayers' money going into this over a period of time.
If that was in one year, it is about 15p on the rate of income
tax, so it is a politically sensitive amount of money. I spent
a six months' sentence on the Public Accounts Committee in my
first period as an MP. How confident are we that this scheme is
not going to be the subject of a future investigation by the National
Audit Office or the PAC? Are we really getting value for money?
Ms Newton: Are you speaking of
the scheme nationally or the scheme in Lancashire?
Q72 Stephen Williams: Speaking from
your local experience.
Ms Newton: Certainly in terms
of the scheme in Lancashire, as I mentioned earlier, we have had
to go through very vigorous assessments to prove that the scheme
that we are putting forward represents value for money. We have
had to satisfy our own internal audit, we have had to satisfy
the leadership of the county council and, indeed, the buy-in from
governing bodies that what we are doing is value for money, given
that they are going to make a contribution over 25 years. We have
had to satisfy Partnership UK, the ODPM, the Project Review Group
from the Treasury, Partnerships for Schools and DfES that the
project in Lancashire is value for money. We have looked at the
lifecycle costs, we have looked at the CAPEX costs, we have had
to put together a very comprehensive outline business case and
final business case and I believe that there are good processes
in place to provide checks and balances to ensure that what local
authorities are doing does represent value for money for the taxpayer.
Q73 Stephen Williams: To most of
your professional peer groups, Lancashire is a model of good practice.
As far as you are aware, is that model followed by every other
LA?
Ms Newton: I could not possibly
comment on whether it is followed by every other LA. Certainly,
within Lancashire, as the Project Director, we are rigorous in
ensuring that we go through the proper checks and balances. We
are in the fortunate position that we have got very good in-house,
legal and financial expertise, we draw in external advice as we
need it, but at the end of the day we are a member-led authority
and our members need to be satisfied at a local level that what
we are doing represents value for money and, obviously, we then
have the national agenda to meet it. I could not comment on what
anybody else does, but we certainly run a very tight ship in Lancashire.
Q74 Stephen Williams: Perhaps we
can look a bit further afield than Lancashire. Other countries,
perhaps in Europe, that are going through a similar programme,
are there examples from abroad that we could learn from?
Ms Newton: I personally do not
know. I understand there are schemes in Scandinavia and I think,
in terms of some of the sustainability agenda, there have been
various trips to look at some of these schemes within Scandinavia.
Unfortunately, my horizons have been very much focused within
Great Britain and what has been happening there and looking at
some of the national examples, the village in Darlington. On an
international level I could not say.
Q75 Stephen Williams: I come back
to some of the questions that Paul Holmes and David Chaytor asked
earlier about the funding mechanism, PFI and so on. If during
the 25-year period a school were to fail, for whatever reason,
your Armageddon syndrome that you mentioned earlier, who picks
up the liabilities to the private sector provider?
Ms Newton: Ultimately the county
council stands covenant guarantor. We have procured this project,
legally the contracts are between the county council, PFI with
the SPB, and so it would be the county council, which is why we
are very rigorous in ensuring it is value for money locally as
well as nationally, because it is a very big commitment for us
and the last thing we want is for this project to fall over after
the huge amount of time, effort and money that we have put into
it.
Q76 Stephen Williams: Can I ask Mr
Jarvis a question based on an earlier answer. It is about human
methods. I think you mentioned there were 21 schools that Bradford
visited as part of your tour to look at what was good elsewhere,
and you said that some of them were better than others. Was there
a pattern in the procurement method? Were PFI schools better than
other schools or LA funded schools?
Mr Jarvis: I had better keep this
answer very anonymous. No, there was no pattern like that. In
fact, in one case we visited two schools, both procured in the
same local authority, on the same day and opened on the same day,
both procured through PFI. In one case PFI seemed to be working
extremely well and in the other case PFI seemed to be working
extremely badly. I think the lessons will have been learnt by
the local authority going forward into future work with BSF. There
has not seemed to us to be a pattern. What there has seemed to
be, and it comes back to another sustainability issue that was
touched on earlier, we have noticed some idiosyncratic ideas where
the design was driven by one particular school leader, the head
teacher at the time, and where we felt that it would be very difficult
for a future head teacher to run those schools. In other words,
we have got unsustainable design issues there in terms of the
interaction between school design and school leadership, and that
is a snare and one to be avoided if at all possible. In terms
of how a local authority is pretty good in schools, we have seen
good design and build schemes procured through conventional capital
routes, we have seen good PFI designs. The only thing I would
say about PFI is that I am strongly convinced, and I have said
this to Partnerships for Schools, that school design is not an
activity to be pursued in the competitive environment if you can
possibly avoid doing so. I believe that with local education partnerships
driving BSF forward, the right thing to do about school design
is to procure your LEP first and then design the school once you
have got an established supply chain rather, than designing schools
in competition with the artificial scenario that that leads to
and the fact that it is impossible, because you are in competition
and in a confidential environment, to make sure that the best
features of one design can be incorporated into another.
Q77 Chairman: In relation to local
education partnerships, what is the best model you saw? It seems
to be very worrying when you said two schools, the same local
authority, one much better than the other, and you hinted that
is down to an idiosyncratic intervention by the head.
Mr Jarvis: Not in that particular
instance, no, that was another local authority, but in this particular
case—
Q78 Chairman: You said in the same
local authority.
Mr Jarvis: I was referring in
that answer to three different schools, one in one authority and
two in another, but where the two schools in the same authority
were concerned, yes, I think the problem there was that the school
was being procured at a time when there was not a head teacher
in post and the head teacher coming in came in to a design which
had not been sufficiently rigorously worked through.
Q79 Chairman: What is the dream-team
to design the scheme, to make sure that there is not a head that
loves Mussolini architecture or there is some mess-up because
there is no head? What is the dream partnership that seems to
work?
Mr Jarvis: The dream partnership
for me is where you have a strongly engaged local authority with
a very strong asset-management base and lots of local in-house
expertise, working with a very good architectural practice, working
with a strong committed school leadership with some ideas of underpinning
its educational vision rather than pragmatism ruling all the time,
supported by the children, the pupils in the school, who are,
after all, going to be the users of the environment you are building.
If you put all of those ingredients together, I think you can
achieve, and I have seen some examples of the achievements, a
very good school design. If you leave any one of those ingredients
out, if you do not have the full support of the local authority,
the full support of school managers and leaders, the full support
of the technical experts, the full support of organisations like
CABE and other experts who can draw your attention to best practice
that you might otherwise be overlooking, the full support of the
students who will be the users of the environment and who can
validate it or criticise it in ways that perhaps adults would
be ill-placed to do, if you lack any one of those ingredients,
you could miss a trick.
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