From Education Guardian Tuesday

The final days of the Learning and Skills Council may yet be its rockiest. Not only is its disillusioned workforce considering strike action over their employment rights, but now comes the realisation that the taxpayer may have to pay nearly £42m merely so the dying quango can vacate its premises.

Of the organisation’s 50 bases around the country, 19 will house the two new quangos, the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA), which are to take over – with local authorities – the LSC’s functions.

The remaining 31 offices are surplus to requirements and all but one of them have leases still to run, in some cases for up to 10 years. Even where these leases have “break clauses”, enabling the LSC to get out of agreements before they end, there are considerable sums to pay to do this.

For the taxpayer, the most painful office closure looks like being the Hertfordshire branch, whose lease runs until 2018. According to documents leaked to Education Guardian, this building in St Albans, housing just 32 people, will cost £12.5m to give up.

The 31 offices are to be handed over to the Treasury, which under normal circumstances could expect to find other government tenants or to sublet them. “This is probably as bad a time to be disposing of commercial property as you could imagine, so landlords won’t take anything less than the maximum because they won’t be able to re-let quickly,” says one LSC insider.

It is galling for the workforce, after they have witnessed the stalling of the capital building programme and the more recent debacle over funding for 16-year-olds, to see such a large sum of public money apparently squandered.

Chris comments: More education money wasted as Government reverses its own policy: how may schools in St Albans would this have built?