More delays for £5bn college building programme

A plan to kickstart some "shovel ready" colleges being built under the government's £5bn further education colleges programme has hit delays because more schemes applied for funding than anticipated.

Chancellor Alistair Darling announced in the Budget earlier this ear that funds were available to enable £750m of new projects to be agreed.

The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) was originally supposed to have identified projects ready to start construction by 3 June for approval at a Council meeting.

But in a letter published yesterday, Learning and Skills Council chief executive Geoff Russell said: "Many more colleges have put forward a case for their projects to be considered as "shovel-ready" than expected, and so unfortunately we are not in a position to ask the Council on 3 June to approve individual projects."

Instead the Council will consider evidence from PricewaterhouseCoopers regarding the "readiness assessment" and the prioritisation process to inform a judgement about which colleges will advance.

Commenting on the plans for prioritising projects, John McDonough, Chairman of the CBI Construction Council, said: “The FE College build programme has become a victim of its own success in recent years as more and more colleges have been coming up with ambitious schemes that cannot be accommodated within the LSC’s budget.

“The additional funds allocated to the LSC in the Budget are therefore very welcome. Given that many of these FE projects are ‘shovel-ready’, this will give construction firms a much needed boost and protect jobs during the recession.

“The CBI’s Construction Council has been calling on the government to adopt smarter ways of procuring projects in order to get the best results for the taxpayer. We therefore welcome the LSC’s focus on value for money. It also makes sense to spread the benefits more widely by going for a larger number of smaller projects rather than a small number of big new colleges.

“But achieving value for money does not mean simply going for the lowest cost option. We must not allow this to become ‘a race to the bottom’ where costs are squeezed to the detriment of quality.”