A ten-year plan to tackle the issue of crumbling concrete in schools was rejected by the Treasury, former schools minister Lord Theodore Agnew has revealed
GB News
Lord Theodore Agnew said a ten-year plan to tackle the issue was rejected
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A ten-year plan to tackle the issue of crumbling concrete in schools was rejected by the Treasury, former schools minister Lord Theodore Agnew has revealed.
He told GB News: “I had probably ten meetings with the Treasury…I said, ‘give me a ten-year envelope of money’, it doesn't have to be any more, but then I can go out to the building industry and say here's a ten-year programme so that you can tool up for dealing with these refurbishments.
“They wouldn’t. They wouldn't do it, they said it has to sit within the spending review.
“I said ‘what was going to happen after the spending review?’ And of course they didn't have an answer to that.”
In a discussion with Camilla Tominey, Lord Agnew, who was also an anti-fraud minister, said there was also a lack of action on Covid loans.
“It was panic initially, they were very worried that the productive economy would be destroyed by the forced closure of millions of businesses with Covid which was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
"But they then closed their ears to sensible suggestions that could have dramatically reduced the amount of fraud that emanated from the loan schemes that they put in place,” he said.
“I literally had shouting matches with them. I was so frustrated at the time when they put the loan proof structure in place.
"And I warned them that they were creating an absolute nightmare for the future and the excuse was a few credit checks would unreasonably delay getting the money out to these businesses, which is total rubbish.
“It would have delayed it by a few hours.
"There was something like 15,000 duplicate loans, so businesses were applying on multiple occasions for them when they were only entitled to one.”
He added: “There were 1,500 loans that went out to companies that weren't even trading when Covid hit because, again, of naivety.
“There was a whole range of these issues.
"And then I did fight a rearguard action to try to recover this by getting additional resource.”
Lord Agnew said an anti-fraud bill promised by the Government has not materialised: “The NAO, the National Audit Office, put the figure at £30 billion a year in fraud loss in Government before Covid, so it’s just astonishing.”
