The claim
“We’re spending more than £16bn over the next four years on school buildings which is…just under twice what was spent in the first eight years of the Labour government.”
Education Secretary Michael Gove, House of Commons, 15 November 2010

The background
Education ministers spent an hour being quizzed by MPs today. There were one or two claims we’ve looked at before on the pupil premium, and Michael Gove’s defence of the coalition’s plans for spending on school buildings also caught our attention.

We’re spending £16bn on school buildings over the spending review period, Gove said, which is around double what Labour spent in their first eight years of government.

But did the Education Secretary do his homework correctly?

The analysis
Over the four year spending review period, which starts next year, the government has committed to spending £15.8bn (not quite the “more than” Mr Gove quoted). That’s £4.9bn next year, falling to £3.4bn in 2014/15 – quite a substantial fall when you consider capital spending on education will be £7.6bn this year.

In contrast, capital spending on schools between 1997/98 and 2004/05 was around £15bn in cash terms, or about £20bn at today’s prices, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

So Mr Gove would have been more accurate to say that spending on school buildings over the next four years would be roughly equivalent to spending under the first eight years of Labour government.

It’s worth mentioning that the Department for Education’s website has a slightly different formulation of Mr Gove’s claim.

“There will be a total of £15.8 billion of capital spending over the period. Although this amounts to a 60 per cent reduction in real terms in capital spending over the period, the annual capital budget will be higher than the average annual capital budget in the 1997-98 to 2004-05 period,” it says.

It’s right, but that means spending on school buildings in 2014/15 will be about the same as it was in 2002/03, the IFS told FactCheck.

And even Mr Gove, before the election, admitted that spending on schools that Labour inherited when it took office was very low. “If we’re talking about investment in school building, then investment in schools buildings during the Conservatives years wasn’t enough, I will grant you that,” he told the Daily Politics Education Debate on 3 May 2010. “Because of the economic problems that we had we faced in the 1980s and the 1990s we didn’t have the investment in school buildings.”

The verdict
Yes, Mr Gove’s point is valid but he needs to check his statistics before making comparisons with the previous Labour government. Total spending on school buildings over the next four years will be similar to what Labour spent in its first eight years in power. But, as Mr Gove himself has said, they started from a very low base.