Came home after Westminster Hour to ponder how to help Alexandra Park School (APS). Out of the blue, and after they had been told there were no more bills to come, the school has been presented with a bill for over £400,000 for alleged ‘variations’ in the PFI contract going back up to seven years. Similar bills are with several other Haringey PFI schools.

This is on top of an expected increase of £120,000 in the annual PFI charge for the future. As the school is already managing its way out of an agreed deficit budget caused by earlier under-funding this news is not welcome – to say the least!

Haringey Council has been predictably useless, though all the schools signed up to PFI at the Labour Council’s insistence. George Meehan (Labour leader of Haringey Council) thinks he can find a few grand here and there or persuade the Government to cough up a bit more and expects the schools to make staff cuts to find the rest.

I am in receipt of a long and excellent letter from the Chair of Governors at APS, one paragraph of which I quote:

3 The Governing Body has not been notified, or given any detail, about the items that apparently now make up these ‘previous years’ variations,’ currently estimated at £414K for APS, or the rate at which these have been charged. It has no basis to confirm that these current costs relate to instructions by the school to vary agreed building plans and no evidence to support such a claim. In fact the Governing Body and the school had every reason to believe that any PFI variation costs that had been incurred had been fully discharged.

This is really too much for any school to tolerate and I fear this demonstrates only the start of PFI chickens coming home to roost in Haringey. I will try to get a meeting with the Head and Chair of Governors as soon as possible.