Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 23 May 2018.
Thank you very much for that question. There are two things that we're doing. We have made available at the end of the last financial year £14 million to schools across Wales to help cover some small-scale maintenance costs. That's money that became available that we were able to get out to schools as quickly as we could. What's also important to note is that, as local authorities put their bids together for band B of the twenty-first century schools programme—as I said, a programme that will see over £2 billion being invested in our school and college premises—one of the new mechanisms for distributing that money actually does allow for a maintenance contract to be a part of the bid, thus covering maintenance costs for some twenty-plus years after the school is built, and many local authorities are looking at that mechanism for addressing the very point that you talk about.