| Topic: | Cuts to Schools Building Programme | |
| Posted by: | Adam Gray | |
| Date/Time: | 20/07/10 17:10:00 |
| The concern is that these aren't "private" business funded by choice by individuals choosing to do business with them. They are being given public funds to (in the case of GP Fundholders) procure what will largely be private sector services. The issue is simply one of accountability over public money. If you don't like how a council runs education change who runs the council. If you don't like the way the Government runs the NHS, vote them out. You can't vote out a GP who overspends his budget (but taxpayers will have to bail them out because the alternative - denying essential care to the needy - is unthinkable). Doesn't it go back to that fundamental tenet of a democracy: no taxation without representation? The government will be taxing you but you'll have absolutely no control over how that money's spent. And what precisely will be the point of electing MPs or councillors, who'll have no responsibility for anything? Let's just move to a technocracy. As for schools holding their own renewals budgets, that's an incredibly inefficient way to resource rebuilding. How can a school budget for the scale of work required to Elliott? The BSF plan for Elliott would have cost millions - not through waste but because of the severity of the problems with the buildings. Other schools may "only" need a new roof, or a redecoration programme. There is no realistic way an individual school could fund capital programmes efficiently or realistically. My final argument is this: I suspect very few doctors, and very few teachers, chose their professions to be accountants, procurement experts, or quantity surveyors. I want these professionals focussed on their vocation, not on the ephemera of budgets, buildings and bidding, vital as those things are. If the motivation here is reduce waste, I suspect the numbers of financial and industry specialists these fundholders or schools would have to buy in individually would proliferate massively. |