UK gave firm £50m aid to carry on building ‘unsafe’ classrooms in Pakistan

LONDON: Britain built classrooms for 120,000 children in Pakistan after being warned the buildings could collapse on them, an investigation by The Times shows.

Officials running British aid’s biggest education infrastructure programme paid a firm more than £50 million to carry on building in an earthquake zone. Yet ultimately the classrooms were abandoned over design flaws, leaving pupils being educated in tents or crammed into existing buildings in the midst of the pandemic.

The huge sum was paid to the company by officials running British aid’s biggest education infrastructure programme. The classrooms were eventually abandoned over design faults, meaning pupils were forced to be educated in tents or packed into current buildings during the coronavirus pandemic. This horrific situation first emerged last year, but The Times investigation claims officials at the Department for International Development (DFID) had been warned of problems long before that.

Ministers were kept in the dark for years, despite the independent assessment of the school plans triggering fears the buildings might not be structurally safe, according to the investigation.

Boris Johnson - who was unaware of design safety concerns - even laid a plaque at one of the schools as a mark of the UK’s investment in the education of Pakistani children. The girls’ school the Prime Minister inaugurated in Lahore has since been evacuated.

The crisis-hit building programme has been slashed to less than 8,000 classrooms, with the cost of each surging from £3,000 to £21,000.

Sarah Champion, chairwoman of the International Development Committee, told The Times: “I do not know of a worse example of aid misspend. It has shocked me to the very core that it went on for so long. This is a scandalous misuse of taxpayers’ mone

“The lack of accountability all the way through — from procurement to health and safety to delivery — was genuinely shocking. Are there other projects like this that are going as catastrophically wrong?

“There were two large failings. One, it seems that civil servants kept the information from ministers. But two, the ministers have known about this and I do not believe that they have got a grip on the scale and the severity of the problem still now.”

Next month, the DFID is being merged into the Foreign Office, with the select committee subsequently being terminated, and as a result, Ms Chapman fears there will now be less parliamentary scrutiny of aid, warning this affair “may well be symptomatic of other large-scale projects that DFID is running”.

The province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the northwestern region of Pakistan, where classrooms were being built, is a dangerous earthquake zone, with 6,704 school buildings suffering damage in 2005 and 815 in 2015.