Rishi Sunak’s “rebuttal” of claims about blocked school rebuilding requests from DfE should still leave the PM facing plenty of scrutiny

Is criticism, from the man who until 2020 was the Department for Education’s leading civil servant, of the Treasury’s recent record of investment in school rebuilding projects “completely and utterly wrong”?

That was the response yesterday from Rishi Sunak, following comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme by Jonathan Slater that had suggested that the Prime Minister, during his time as Chancellor, had rejected a request from the DfE for more funding for school buildings, instead cutting its financial support for such projects.

Was Mr Sunak right to say this? Well, the evidence from what I can find of the public record, including a report on school buildings by the National Audit Office published in June, calls into question at least the broad thrust of what the Prime Minister has said, even if on the narrow point on whether spending reduced during Mr Sunak’s time as Chancellor he may have been right.

The detail: what Mr Slater said

As reported on this website and widely across the media, Mr Slater, DfE permanent secretary from 2016 to 2020, said in his interview on the Today programme that, during his time at the department, its officials had concluded that it needed to rebuild 300-400 schools a year, because of their condition.

He had added that, during his time as Permanent Secretary, “we got the funding to replace about 100 schools per year”.