Government is scrapping classroom upgrades to pay for tax cuts, Labour claims
Tuesday, 27 February 2024
The Government will conduct a Ministerial Inquiry to address problems with the school property system.
The Ministry of Education has paused 20 building projects and said there could be up to 350 projects in where expectations are beyond what could be delivered.
Te Tātoru o Wairau Marlborough school’s construction estimates grew from $170 million in 2018 to $405 million.
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Labour leader Chris Hipkins says National is scrapping much-needed school refurbishments to pay for tax cuts after Prime Minister Christopher Luxon blamed the previous government for his plans to dump school upgrades and start a review of the country’s stock of classrooms.
Luxon, who is under pressure to find 6.5% savings in public spending and find money for his manifesto commitments including promised tax cuts for every income level, gave a scathing criticism of Labour’s education ministers, including Hipkins, as he scrapped “unrealistic and unaffordable” plans to refurbish and upgrade school infrastructure. The Ministry had paused 20 building projects since National came to power, Luxon said.
“It's just abysmal economic management. The reality is the previous government couldn't manage stuff well,” he said with Education Minister Erica Stanford in Wellington on Monday.
He rejected that his directive to find 6.5% worth of savings was related to the decision to scrap the projects. “We've been very clear, we want education to generate savings so that we can actually deploy them into the front line … don’t conflate the two things.”
However, in a November briefing to the incoming Education Minister Erica Stanford, the Ministry said it would not be able to find more than 2% worth of savings without cutting into its spending on school property.
Hipkins, who was the minister in charge of education for five years, said the former National government underfunded school infrastructure and that Labour upgraded every school in the country through its school investment package.
“We built thousands of classrooms and added urgent temporary teaching spaces as rolls grew,” he said in a statement.
“Everyone will remember children learning in damp, mouldy classroom and schools with no space and no funding under National, who were comfortable with kids being taught in gyms and hallways. We don’t want to go back to that.”
He said Labour’s school upgrades were based on advice from the Ministry of Education. “The process for school building work was changed under the last National government and we continued the approach they put in place,” he said.
“Cost escalations in the building sector have been a fact of life. National were told before the election they hadn’t allowed enough for cost escalations in their fiscal plan and chose to ignore that and claim tax cuts were affordable.”
The quality of classrooms has long been a political issue. The former National government foisted a controversial trend for open-plan primary and secondary schools - which are cheaper to build than traditional classrooms - from about 2011. National’s then Education Minister Hekia Parata, vowed to revamp every primary and secondary school – all 38,000 classrooms – to the new modern learning environment standards by 2021.
Under the former National government, the Ministry of Education seriously reduced its annual spend on classroom improvements between 2011 to 2013. In 2010, it spent $606,525 but this dropped to $476,668 and then $393,270. It started tracking up again the following year, to $446,841. By 2022, the Labour government spent $1.561m on upgrades.
But Luxon said Labour raised “expectations big time and then literally before projects are starting you find out you haven't been haven't got the funding in place to actually support that”.
“Here we go with an education budget that's very large portfolio of buildings and poorly managed. That's what we're trying to get the bottom off because we need to have a culture of fiscal discipline put into the public services.”
The November briefing noted the “current fiscal position in education is extremely tight” and there were “multiple pressures” on its budget.
“There are some significant pressures in the education fiscal environment that the Government will need to act quickly to manage,” it read.