Joe Anderson: We were left high and dry when Michael Gove scrapped Building Schools for the Future

As we’ve seen, this week marks the 70^th anniversary of the founding of our National Health Service, the exemplar of what positive state intervention and public money can produce for a society.

This week also sees a far less illustrious birthday. It’s eight years since the coalition government scrapped the Building Schools for the Future programme. As part of the initial round of masochistic spending cuts after 2010, the £55bn BSF was axed entirely, leaving dozens of local authorities and hundreds of schools without promised investment for new buildings.

Liverpool was one of the councils left high and dry. Our funding was cut and the negotiations with civil servants ended abruptly. It was a cruel and spiteful decision by then education secretary, Michael Gove, who wanted to earn his spurs for slashing departmental spending.

The cost to cities like Liverpool – with more than our fair share of dilapidated school buildings – was not even an afterthought. Nearly six out of ten of the schools that saw savage cuts to funding for building and refurbishment were in Labour constituencies. Coincidence?

Our response in Liverpool was to take matters into our own hands. We invited our various education partners to sit around the table and work together to produce an alternative strategy. The Liverpool Schools Investment Programme was born, using whatever council funding we could find – and all other government cash we could beg and borrow – to generate a £180m funding pot.

This has enabled us to build, rebuild or substantially repair 23 schools in the city. 16 have been rebuilt, four have benefitted from significant rebuilding, while a further four have received new extensions and out-buildings. Around 18,000 pupils in the city are now benefitting from state-of the art classroom facilities, helping with the task of ensuring our children get the best state education we can provide.

The programme didn’t only make a difference for those in the classroom. We set out to make sure that local people would benefit from the 2,000 construction jobs that were created. What’s more, 200 local young people were given the chance to develop their skills and career prospects by being apprentices.

Nearly two-thirds of the investment was spent with Liverpool firms. Around £45m worth of funding was generated from the sale of former school sites for housing development, which helped us recoup some of the outlay. We also managed to secure an additional £650,000 a year from the lease of buildings that we will be able to reinvest in frontline services for the next 25 years.

All of which is to say that we manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But it shouldn’t have been this hard. Years later, Michael Gove was asked what ministerial decision he regretted the most. He said the following: “One I do ‘fess up to, which happened fairly early on when I was Education Secretary, was cancelling Building Schools for the Future. It was not so much that it was wrong to try to save public money. It was done in a crass and insensitive way. It taught me a lesson.”

Cold comfort for the kids and teachers he left in the lurch. Like our beloved NHS, there are areas of public spending that should be beyond serious dispute. Ensuring free, cradle to grave healthcare is obviously one of them, but ensuring our children are given the best chance in life by being educated in schools that are safe, clean and modern learning environments should be up there too.

Joe Anderson is mayor of Liverpool.