David Willetts

Responding to the damning report by Sir Andrew Foster into the chaos in the further education capital programme, Shadow Innovation, Universities and Skills Secretary, David Willetts said:

“This report is shocking. It finds failures at every level, and lays much of the blame at the feet of ministers.

“The Learning and Skills Council took their eyes off the ball because of the constant reorganisations imposed from above. First, ministers split the capital budgets for schools and further education. Then, they put the LSC on death row, which stopped them from planning ahead properly. And, despite causing the disruption, ministers then failed to monitor the information it was receiving.

“It is an appalling catalogue of mismanagement, but it is time for politicians to stop hiding behind officials. The only people responsible for the endless reorganisations are ministers.

“Ultimately, responsibility for this goes all the way to the top.”

Notes to Editors

· The Foster Report: A Review of the Capital Programme in Further Education, was published on 1 April 2009.

· The report found a catalogue of problems. Despite knowing about the overspend in the further education capital programme since February 2008, no action was taken to tackle the situation. The report concludes:

‘DIUS monitored the LSC during the period and had most of the information that was actually collected and held centrally by the LSC. Senior staff in DIUS could have probed more actively the robustness of the forward projections of future funding commitments. Their challenge was insufficiently incisive to uncover ongoing flaws in implementation.’ (page 6)

ENDS