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Was school demolished to avoid hefty VAT bill?
• DEMOLITION of Mary Magdalene Primary School in Liverpool Road, Holloway, is under way. A replacement school has already been built, as part of a 1,360-pupil academy, on the site of the former Bride Street park. It will open in September.
VAT avoidance may have played a part in the decision to demolish (Academy hit with £4m VAT bill for canteen, August 3). Why wasn’t the existing successful and popular primary incorporated into the academy? Why was demolition chosen, and on what grounds?
Residents against Mary Magdalene Academy (RAMMA) has been seeking answers to these questions for more than three months. Minutes released by the council under the Freedom of Information Act are incomplete.
The matter is now in the hands of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the newly-named government education department, formerly the DFES. The documents have been promised for the end of August. What is clear from the minutes to date, however, is that it was the DFES that led the call for demolition. The spokesman for the department’s buildings design unit involved in the project stated that “...space on the site would be compromised if the present school were not demolished. The Design Team will talk to [Islington’s] planners about all these issues”.
Though a later minute notes that the “option 10” design “allowed for refurbishment of [the] existing primary school” and “greater retention of green spaces”, the minutes fail to record why this alternative to demolition was rejected and whether there were any objections.
The answer may be VAT-related. The minute citing option 10 refers to “refurbishment [as] often more expensive and less satisfactory than new build. In [the event of refurbishment] the capital cash limit would have to be adjusted accordingly”.
This is because of an absurd Treasury ruling which means demolish-and-rebuild is VAT-free while more environmentally sustainable refurbishment incurs VAT on the whole of a development.
How far the independence of local planners was affected by the DFES’s preference for demolition must also be of concern. The refusal of the Government Office for London to reconsider the planning permission granted for the academy rested in significant part on the assertion that the borough’s planners, not central government, were most suited to decide on the scheme.
What is unquestionable is that the decision to demolish the primary school has landed residents of the surrounding streets with a development inappropriate in scale and impact and robbed them of a neighbourhood park and playground.
Sixty-seven mature trees were felled to make way for the unnecessary new-build primary. There will be views into and out of the bedrooms of Bride Street residents.
RAMMA believes that democratic accountability demands that residents be involved from the outset in the location and design of large-scale developments. Inviting their comments and three-minutes objection time at planning committee meetings, after these have been decided, are nothing more than cosmetic. In the case of the Mary Magdalene Academy, the opposition of 650 local people was ignored. The resulting impact on residents is clear for all to see.
MEG HOWARTH
RAMMA
Ellington Street, N7
• I WAS interested to read that members of the City of London Academy – Islington steering group are now seeking to win the “hearts and minds” of parents and the school’s staff for their plan to close Islington Green School and hand over the “independent” school which will replace it to two “sponsors”, neither of whom is accountable to the community (Academy hit with £4m VAT bill for canteen, August 3) .
It’s a bit late, some might say. Islington’s Lib Dem council has failed to convince more than a small minority that it is right to put at risk the achievements of a school which recently appeared on the London Challenge “tube map” of the metropolis’s most improved schools.
Only two of the five groups at the borough’s Schools Organisation Committee (SOC), which met in January, voted to close Islington Green School (IGS) – and this followed an 89-3 vote against the proposal by school staff.
Hostile responses to the academy plan in last year’s consultation exercise outnumbered those in support by at least 10 to one.
Minutes of an earlier steering group meeting, shortly after the SOC vote, claim “IGS climate now changing, staff meeting had a positive effect”. This is as untrue as earlier claims that staff at the school were in favour of it becoming an academy.
Stunned silence due to exasperation at the way the academy plan is being railroaded through by Lord Adonis and Islington Council should not be taken to mean we have finally “seen the light” (to use a term which would surely be approved by the religious charitable trust which is anonymously paying City University’s £1 million share of the required sponsorship money for the new school).
If Councillor Ursula Woolley, Islington cabinet member for children's’ services, really believes she has the support of parents, teachers and school support staff for closing IGS and turning it into an academy, then I challenge her to a public debate at a time and place of her own choosing but before the funding agreement for the new school is signed and the bulldozers start to move in.
I also challenge her to follow the debate with a secret ballot of parents of children at Islington Green and feeder primary schools in which provision is made for opponents of the academy plan to have equal facilities to distribute literature outlining their views to those of the council.
KEN MULLER
National Union of Teachers representative, Islington Green School
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