Sadiq Khan urges Tories to be ‘transparent’ over school concrete crisis

Sadiq Khan says Tories need to be 'transparent' over school concrete crisisPA

Transcript

00:00 The Department of Education, the government aren't sharing with me information about the

00:12 consequences of RAAC. I still don't know how many schools in London are affected by RAAC.

00:19 We wrote to the government in the first week of August asking them the implications of

00:23 this on our hospitals, on our housing and so forth. We have no idea about police stations

00:29 affected, about fire stations affected, about other public buildings affected. I think the

00:33 government's got to come clean and be transparent. What are the schools that are affected? What

00:38 are the schools in London that are affected? This would be reassuring to staff, to parents,

00:44 to children and to others. And rather than hiding, I think the government should publish

00:50 the list. Despite regular requests to the government to share the information, they

00:54 fail to do so. We know from the public domain eight schools in London are affected. We know

00:59 separately, privately, two other schools that may be affected. But imagine you're a parent,

01:03 not knowing whether your child is safe going to the school, a member of staff not knowing

01:07 if the building is safe, not knowing what remedial action you've got to take. My frustration

01:11 is I learnt through the Grenfell Tower tragedy that actually if you know there's a problem,

01:16 for example, in that case with cladding, knowing there are problems with other tower blocks,

01:21 other universities, other hospitals led to remediation and making those buildings safe.

01:26 It took some time to make them safe.