Dear Editor

TWENTY million pounds of public money was spent on building the Sir Frederick Gibberd school in Harlow to provide desperately needed additional school places. Yet after just two years, pupils are back in temporary classrooms or being bussed around to other schools because the building is dangerously unsafe and is likely to need demolition.

Our current MP, Conservative Mr Halfon, complacently says that the Government will pay for repairs or a replacement. But this is tax payers money, coming from the existing schools’ budget, being spent to rectify a chaotic situation that would not have happened under a competent government. Money that cannot now be spent elsewhere.

This incompetent Government chose to use a building contractor that was not even a member of the trade body for modular design builders to build a modular design school, a company that has conveniently gone bankrupt so they cannot be pursued for the rebuild costs of SFG or the other two or three schools that they constructed that have needed demolition.

After recent revelations about Conservative donors, family members and friends profiting hugely from dodgy PPE contracts at the expense of the tax payer Mr Halfon should answer the following questions.

1) Did any of the directors of Caledonia Modular have any links to the Conservative party?

2) Who chose Caledonia Modular, a company not a member of the modular building trade body, to construct these modular buildings?

3) Who oversaw the construction, ensuring it met building standards and who signed the buildings off as safe and fit for purpose?

Your sincerely

Mark Ingall