Schools (Capital Allocations) (Hansard, 17 December 1993)

§ Mr. Robin Squire

Local education authorities have today been informed of their annual capital guidelines—ACGs—for schools which, together with supplementary credit approvals to be issued later, will total £403 million in 1994–95. They have also been informed of their allocations for capital and repairs spending by the governors of voluntary-aided and special agreement schools in their areas—the overall grant to be made available in 1994–95 will be £113.6 million. Provision for both sectors reflects the continuing transfer of local authority schools to the grant-maintained sector.

In distributing ACGs, we have again given priority to the second and third year expenditure on work approved in earlier years; basic need projects to provide new school places in areas of growing demand; cost-effective projects to remove surplus places.

Allocations in the basic need and surplus place removal categories are at historically high levels, reflecting growth in pupil numbers and the success of the pressures we have put on LEAs to remove spare capacity.

ACGs do not represent the full total of resources available to LEAs for capital expenditure. Authorities are also able to spend additional sums from capital receipts and from their revenue budgets if they so choose. The substantial sum available for 1994–95 should enable LEAs to continue to make significant progress in improving the school building stock.

Of the total of £113.6 million grant for voluntary-aided schools, £45.6 million has been set aside for repairs. The remainder—£68 million—is to be provided for capital work. A total of £18 million of this will support new work to provide for new school places, cost-effective removal of surplus capacity, as well as a range of improvement and replacement projects. Twenty-three major projects have been authorised to start and a further 29 to proceed to initial design work.

Details of individual LEAs' ACGs and grant allocations have been placed in the Library.