CRUMBLING concrete. Crumbling government. How the media love a metaphor. Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), once hailed as a material for building schools and hospitals at a price that did not drain the public purse, has now become a symbol of the false economy of a decade of austerity.

Public spending cuts, for political parties bent on grabbing quick electoral advantage, can bring short-term gain — but only at the cost of long-term economic pain when unmaintained classroom ceilings begin to collapse and a costly school-rebuilding programme becomes inevitable.

Until 2010, there was a Building Schools for the Future programme, but it was cancelled by the coalition government’s Education Secretary, Michael Gove. The Labour Party has this week seized upon this, pointing out that it has asked no fewer than 150 parliamentary questions about the state of schools in the past year alone.

There is more to this than the usual party-political ding-dong, however. Non-political actors have entered the fray. Most unusually, a retired senior civil servant has intervened. Jonathan Slater, the former Permanent Secretary at the Education Department, publicly revealed that there was a need to rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year, and that he had recommended that the Government refurbish 200 a year. But the Treasury cut this to 100, and the figure was then halved again to just 50 by Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor.

But, when Mr Sunak last week riposted that it was “completely and utterly wrong” to suggest that he was to blame, claiming that 50 had been the annual target for several years previously, two independent bodies hit back.

Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies contrasted the meagre spending of the past three or four years with spending before 2010. And the National Audit Office revealed that it had earlier warned the Government that it was neglecting the “unflashy” job of “efficiently maintaining public buildings and replacing obsolete technology” in favour of “more eye-catching new projects”. This “sticking-plaster approach” cost more in the end.

The sudden move to close schools, it has been reported privately — but not publicly at the time of writing — was triggered by the dramatic collapse of a RAAC concrete ceiling block in an unnamed school two weeks ago. What elevated it into a political crisis was the Government’s failure to act until the day before many pupils were due back at school. Then, the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan — who was on holiday in Spain as the RAAC crisis developed — complained in a spectacular display of arrogance, entitlement, and self-delusion that she was receiving no credit despite doing a “f***ing good job” while “everyone else has sat on their arse.”

Her idea of a good job, one primary head told me, consisted of sending out a questionnaire to schools asking head teachers and caretakers to “have a look’” to see whether they had a problem. Unsure of what to look for, the head took her £2000 electricity contingency money “to pay someone qualified to ‘have a look’ — and if they think further investigation is necessary then it will be a lot more money”. As ever, while politicians play the blame game, it is the ordinary people who suffer.