From the Observer; Sunday 06/03/2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/06/michael-gove-architecture-in-schools

Gove is very much right about one thing, which is that the last government's £55bn Building
Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary
school in the country, was a monstrously wasteful and cumbersome process, which often led to
very poorly designed schools. The "creaming off", however, was not being done by architects,
who were, instead, among the first to point out the faults of the programme.

The main beneficiaries were the financial institutions and their advisers who funded the
programme, who will earn handsome returns and bonuses for years to come at the taxpayers'
expense. They are followed by the big construction companies, several of which were fined
in 2008 by the Office of Fair Trading for breach of competition law – ie price-fixing – on a
range of project types. They were, to coin a phrase, creaming off the funds of clients, including
local authorities.

This unfortunate blemish has not impeded the same companies from securing huge education
contracts, and it would be stretching credulity to think that price-fixing never now happens in
school building. …

There are also the lawyers who expensively write and rewrite the byzantine contracts, at hourly
rates several times greater than architects', and project managers, who do less, and less useful
work than architects for a similar total cost. Worst of all was the waste inherent in BSF's
processes: it cost contractors up to £3m to bid for a package of schools. They would expect to
win one in three, meaning that they would want to recover £9m from successful bids just to
cover their bidding costs.

Gove's department is unable to produce the figures on which he makes his assertions, saying
that "detailed data on individual projects was held locally to minimise the regulatory burden on
projects and project reporting". It is, however, possible to find out that architects' fees have been
between 2.5% and 5% of construction cost. If capital costs other than construction are included,
this can drop to well under 2% of the total. If, as happened under BSF, future running costs are
included in the contract, architects' fees become a tiny proportion. Most architects working on
schools will tell you that it pays less well than almost any other kind of work and is sometimes
loss-making. One says that schools work "is threatening to put us out of business".