“When making the relevant decision, the competent authority must assume that nutrients in urban wastewater from the potential development . . . will not adversely affect the relevant site,” The government amendment to the levelling-up and Regeneration Bill says.

An “adverse effect” from these nutrients “is not a ground for the competent authority to determine” that the development (basically, new housing) will add to pollution, “even if a finding . . . to the contrary is made”.

Welcome to Alice Through the Looking Glass!

Matthew Parris www.thetimes.co.uk (Extract)

Early this year The Times dedicated itself to a Clean It Up campaign to restore Britain’s rivers and waterways to ecological health. How are ministers doing in response? I hate to bother you with the actual wording of a piece of proposed legislation but don’t worry, I’m not asking you to make sense of it. I’m inviting you to take note of weird syntax, tortured logic and opaque intentions, then smell a big, fat rat.

The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill has suddenly, weeks after most of it has gone through parliament, been landed with a late clause governing the impact of housebuilding on natural habitats. “When making the relevant decision, the competent authority must assume that nutrients in urban wastewater from the potential development . . . will not adversely affect the relevant site,” it reads.

Nutrients are what you flush down the lavatory, which can wreck the ecology of our rivers. So put in the language we are pleased to call English, this paragraph means that when considering an application to build, the authorities must assume that what poisons rivers does not poison rivers.

The clause goes on to deem that any concern about an “adverse effect” from these nutrients “is not a ground for the competent authority to determine” that the development (basically, new housing) will add to pollution, “even if a finding . . . to the contrary is made”. Thus, any finding that extra sewage will pollute rivers cannot be grounds for finding it will pollute rivers.

This is pure Alice Through the Looking Glass. In plain language, it means that if a new housing development will add to what’s tipped into our rivers, planning authorities must assume it won’t. And that is what the two responsible secretaries of state, Michael Gove and Thérèse Coffey, now want parliament to lay down. Clearly the big housebuilding companies have got at the prime minister; and the prime minister has got at Gove and Coffey; and Gove and Coffey have now executed a complete U-turn on a piece of environmental law that nibbled at the edge of big housebuilders’ profits……

……..Farewell, then, to this perhaps last of the once-famous Brexit dividends: that we’d be free to frame our own, enhanced, environmental protections. Farewell to the 2021 Environment Act, whose stipulation that the act “will not have the effect of reducing the level of protection provided for by existing environmental law” must urgently be removed by parliament if the government is not to be massacred at judicial review. In keeping with the new drafting style, the stipulation could be left in place but an amendment brought in providing that anything found to be a reduction in environmental protection must be assumed not to be a reduction.

Farewell, too, to the Rishi Sunak who as a young MP sat on the environment, food and rural affairs select committee. Farewell to the Michael Gove whose 2017 post-referendum speech (a fine speech: “The Unfrozen Moment — Delivering a Green Brexit”) quoted Philip Larkin, waxed lyrical and declared that “I have no intention of weakening the environmental protections that we have put in place while in the European Union”.

“We live on the same planet,” he said. “The only one we know which can sustain human life . . . Again and again, societies and civilisations have been gripped by hubris, by the belief that this time is different, that the cycles of the past have been broken.”

I plead guilty to hubris. I have believed that Gove would be different, that the cycle of ministers making promises and then forgetting them would be broken. I still cannot quite believe he is acquiescing in
this retreat.That Larkin poem lamented the approaching despoilation of our country. It bears the title Going, Going and includes the line: “And that will be England gone.” Gove should re-read it.

A new analysis by The Independent reveals the prime minister is being forced to rely on a dwindling pool of donors, as support for the Conservatives drains away and opinion polls show the party is on course to be booted out at the next election.

Adam Forrest www.independent.co.uk

An astonishing four-fifths of all individual donations made to the Conservative Party since Mr Sunak entered Downing Street have come from just 10 wealthy people, according to an analysis by The Independent.

The 10 super-rich backers have given a combined sum of £10.6m to the Tories since Mr Sunak became PM – accounting for 83 per cent of the £12.7m received from individuals since he took charge.

That figure was much lower under his predecessors Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron – and suggests the party is becoming more “heavily reliant” on a small group of supporters under Mr Sunak than under other recent Tory prime ministers.

Egyptian-born billionaire Mohamed Mansour, a former minister in Hosni Mubarak’s government, is the biggest single backer of the Sunak era. The UK-based retail magnate said he gave £5m in May because the PM “understands how growth is generated”.

Others in the top 10 donors list for the Sunak era include long-time Tory backers such as Lubov Chernukhin – wife of the former Russian oligarch Vladimir Chernukhin – who gave £136,000. Her lawyer has insisted that her donations “have never been tainted by Kremlin or any other influence”.

Here are the top Tory donors since Rishi Sunak became PM

£5m – Mohamed Mansour

The Egyptian-born billionaire – a former minister under the Hosni Mubarak government – is chairman of retail and investment giant Mansour Group. The UK-based mogul said he made the huge donation because Mr Sunak “understands how growth is generated”.

£2.5m – Graham Edwards

Mr Edwards owns one of Britain’s biggest private property firms, Telereal Trillium. He said in June he had donated so much since Mr Sunak came to power because the PM was someone who could “get things done” and would keep the “dangerous ideologies” of the Labour Party out of power.

£2m – Amit Lohia

Dubbed the “Prince of Polyester”, the Indian-born 48-year-old is the non-executive director of Indorama Ventures Ltd – a major producer of polyester. His spokesperson said the donation, his first to the Tories, was made in a “personal capacity”.

£336,000 – Richard Harpin

A regular Tory donor, the chief executive of insurance giant HomeServe has personally donated more than £2m to the party since 2008. Mr Harpin’s company was fined £30m in 2014 for misselling insurance.

£250,000 – Malcolm Healey

The billionaire owns Wren Kitchens’ parent company, West Retail Group, and has given more than £3m personally to the party since 2017. Wren Kitchens was criticised for claiming millions of pounds’ worth of Covid furlough money, despite recording a £75.3m profit.

£163,000 – Christopher Wood

Professor Wood is the director at Medannex and several other biopharmaceutical firms. Another consistent Tory donor, he has personally given more than £1m to the Conservatives since 2014, the Electoral Commission records show.

£136,000 – Lubov Chernukhin

The former banker is married to the former Russian oligarch Vladimir Chernukhin. She has given more than £2.4m to the Tories since 2012. She reportedly paid £45,000 for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson. Her lawyer previously told the BBC her donations to the party “have never been tainted by Kremlin or any other influence”.

£125,000 – Selva Pankaj

Mr Pankaj founded the Regent Group, which has interests in education, training and investment management and runs London’s Regent College. He has personally given more than £600,000 to the Tories.

£100,000 – Alasdair Locke

The energy magnate is the founder of Motor Fuel Group, the UK’s largest owner of petrol station forecourts. Mr Locke has personally donated almost £1m to the party. He insists that he has “never sought to influence or shape policy”.

£83,000 – Michael Hintze

The UK-based, Australian-British financier is the founder of asset management giant CQS. Mr Hintze has given more than £4.5m to the Tories since 2001. He was given a peerage under Boris Johnson in 2022.

Tory green policies seem to have turned a distinctive shade of blue

In one hospital, heavy patients must be treated on the ground floor because the combined weight with equipment is too heavy to be safe.

Meg Hillier, Chairwoman of Public Accounts Committee

It takes a lot to shock members of the Commons public accounts committee. In our review of major government programmes we see many costly failures. But in late July members visited two hospitals built with RAAC, a lightweight form of concrete cast in planks, and it was jaw-dropping.

We had held a hearing on RAAC in schools a week before but seeing the real-life impact was eye-opening — and alarming. In one hospital, staff can carry out roof maintenance only if they and their tools are below a certain weight. Heavy patients must be treated on the ground floor because the combined weight with equipment is too heavy to be safe. Roof failure is a daily risk.

The issue of RAAC in schools was first identified as a significant problem after a roof collapse in 2018. But it was as far back as 1999 when the standing committee on structural safety recommended that all buildings with pre-1980 RAAC plank roofs should be inspected. So why was action not taken earlier?

The most recent survey of stock condition of schools in England was in its early stages in 2017 and, with fractured ownership of school buildings and varied skills and resources at local level, there was too little oversight in Whitehall of the shared risks and potential costs across the estate. It wasn’t until 2020 that the current school rebuilding programme was established.

The problems with RAAC are concentrated in schools built between the mid-1950s and 1980s. It is not a coincidence that nearly three quarters of the schools in the poorest condition were built between 1951 and 1980. Funding is undoubtedly an issue. The longer schools are expected to operate beyond their expected life, the more they cost to maintain. Between 2016 and 2023, around three quarters of funding for buildings was spent on maintenance and repair. The Department for Education argued that £7 billion a year would be the best-practice level of annual capital funding. It asked the Treasury in 2020 for £4 billion a year and was allocated £3.1 billion. So even on its own estimates there is not enough funding to do the necessary work.

The impact of this week’s announcement on the wider school maintenance and replacement programmes is likely to be significant. At our hearing in July it was clear that officials were being thorough with the proportion of school buildings they were working on, including the surveys of 600 schools with RAAC which have led to this week’s decision. But this is the tip of the iceberg of a failing school estate in England. Most of the 700,000 pupils currently being educated in substandard buildings are not in RAAC buildings and will now be waiting longer for the improvements they need.

There are 500 “slots” in the school rebuilding programme and 100 unallocated which were set aside to respond to the very issues that have led to school closures this week.

The permanent secretary at the DfE told the public accounts committee in July that “if there is something that is putting students or teachers in danger that the school cannot manage itself, we will act immediately”. Ministers have done that — and rightly so. But this last-minute scramble just before term starts could have been avoided with longer-term planning, a coherent school-building programme and sustainable funding.

Make do not mend! – Owl

Ministers and special advisers were “trying to get away with spending as little as they could” and hoping to “make do” rather than treating the problem with the urgency it required.

Toby Helm www.theguardian.com 

A senior civil service whistleblower has told the Observer that Tory ministers and their political advisers were “dangerously complacent” about crumbling school buildings constructed with aerated concrete, and that they were more concerned with saving money than improving safety.

The source, who worked in the private office of Nadhim Zahawi, the then education secretary, saw regular alerts crossing his desk. He said ministers and special advisers were “trying to get away with spending as little as they could” and hoping to “make do” rather than treating the problem with the urgency it required.

The insider, who no longer works in the Department for Education, said he had seen four or five detailed “submissions” from other civil servants to ministers and advisers on the specific issue of “reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete” Raac, in the space of a few months in early 2022.

Raac is a lightweight, bubbly form of concrete, usually found in roofs and occasionally walls and floors, and was used in many schools that were built from the 1950s to the 1990s. It looks like standard concrete but is weaker and less durable than the traditional reinforced material.

The whistleblowers’ remarks echo a series of emails leaked to the Observer last year in which civil servants said more money was desperately needed from the Treasury to repair dangerous school buildings. On 4 April 2022, officials raised the alarm, warning that some school sites were a “risk to life”.

The whistleblower added: “It just wasn’t a priority for the Spads [special advisers] or politicians. There is a good case for being cautious and prudent but the general environment of not funding things and trying to make do – that is where we are after 13 years [of Conservative government].”

He also pointed out that the DfE had been able to fund a large extra pay settlement for teachers this year from an underspend in its budget, suggesting there had been money available to do more on school rebuilding had the issue been a top priority.

On Thursday, with only days to go before children return to their classrooms after the summer holidays, the government ordered more than 100 schools to either shut buildings that were constructed with Raac, or cordon off parts of them. The DfE refused to say how many schools had been closed completely although the number is understood to be about two dozen.

Officials said the emergency measures were due to “a small number of cases where Raac had failed with no warning”. One of these is believed to have occurred last week.

Hundreds of specialist surveyors are now being sent out to schools known to be have been constructed to varying degrees with Raac to assess their safety, meaning inevitable disruption for pupils and staff, who in some case are being moved to temporary accommodation.

Labour is aiming to pin responsibility for spending cuts to the school rebuilding programme on Rishi Sunak after new analysis from the party showed that, since he was appointed chancellor in February 2020, the government’s total spending on the programme had been cut by a cumulative £869m.

The leaked emails published last year by this newspaper suggested that the Treasury was blocking more funds for school rebuilding. Labour’s analysis reveals that spending on school rebuilding in 2019-20 was £765m, but after Sunak became chancellor this dropped to £560m in 2020-21 and as little as £416m in 2021-22, a fall of 41% overall.

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, told the Observer in an interview that it was “incredible” that the government had not heeded warnings and had refused to publish a detailed list of schools in danger.

“Labour warned time and again about the risks posed by the crumbling schools estate under the Conservatives but were met with complacency, obstinacy and inaction.

“Ministers need to come clean about the number of schools affected, what they knew, and when they knew, about the risks posed by Raac so that parents can be reassured their children are safe at school.”

Labour is planning to force a Commons vote this week to compel the government to reveal information about what it knew about the use of Raac and the dangers it posed. The party plans to put forward a “humble address” – an arcane parliamentary mechanism sometimes used to demand papers from government departments – to force the publication of a list of affected schools.

As parliament returns from its summer recess, Opinium’s latest poll for the Observer has Labour leading by 14 points with 42% of the vote share (+1 compared with a fortnight ago). The Conservatives are on 28% (+2). The Liberal Democrats are on 9% (-2), Reform UK is on 8% (-1) and the Green party is also on 8% (+1).

Sunak will be disappointed to see that his approval rating has not seen any recovery during the summer, despite a series of announcements on immigration and schools, which have been dogged with problems such as the concrete crisis.

The prime minister’s rating has fallen two percentage points in the past two weeks to -25% net (24% approve, 49% disapprove). The Labour leader Keir Starmer’s approval rating is -7% net (28% approve, 35% disapprove).

Similarly, views on who would make the best prime minister have also remained stable – Starmer now leads with 27% choosing the Labour leader, versus 23% who told pollsters they would pick Sunak.