Labour leader accuses prime minister of neglecting pupils at state schools during combative PMQs
Keir Starmer has likened Rishi Sunak’s government to a group of “cowboy builders” during a prime minister’s questions in which the Labour leader sought to portray the prime minister as out of touch over the concrete crisis.
Starmer also contrasted the chaos faced in the state system with the private education enjoyed by the PM and his children, saying Sunak neglected the problem because he saw it as a problem affecting “other people’s children”.in which he used all of his questions to lambast Sunak over the issue, Starmer said: “On the one hand, we have him saying it’s nothing to do with him. On the other side, we have the facts.
“The truth is, this crisis is the inevitable result of 13 years of cutting corners, botch jobs, sticking-plaster politics. It’s the sort of thing you expect from cowboy builders, saying that everyone else is wrong, everyone else is to blame, protesting they’ve done an effing good job, even as the ceiling falls in.
Elsewhere in an often combative session, Starmer argued that Sunak was directly responsible for much of the crisis due to, to slash a DfE request for funding to rebuild hundreds of schools a year, reducing it to 50. Starmer cited the case of a school in Kent, where a Raac-built ceiling collapsed in 2018, saying: “Everyone knew the problem existed in other schools. Yet the prime minister decided to halve the budget for school maintenance just a couple of years later.
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