The LSC announced on Friday that it would not be supporting any of the eight schemes across Sussex, three of them in Brighton & Hove. Varndean, BHASVIC and City College had all be more-or-less instructed to be ambitious about the development of their estates and City College had plans for a £100m rebuilding scheme that would have seen the demolition of its existing city centre site and the construction of a brand new campus.

City College had spent two years and literally millions of pounds from College funds to draw up the plans. But the writing was on the wall when the government realised earlier this year that the recession, plummeting tax revenues and declining property values meant they could no longer afford to fund all of the schemes they had promoted which amounted to every FE college in the country.

Now it has announced that it will fund just 13 projects out of a total of 144 across the UK. The Building Colleges for the Future programme had encouraged bids from colleges worth £5.7bn more than its budget. To make matters worse a total of £2.7bn of those bids were approved in principle despite the LSC being unable to fund the schemes. It is not certain if the LSC will reimburse colleges for the money that they have already spent, much of which was borrowed on the strength of LSC promises. The situation will be reviewed again in 2011.

ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP COMMENT

Our three FE Colleges do a fantastic job with their students and they will continue to do so, despite the disappointment and inevitable sense of betrayal. But they do so from antiquated buildings that are past their shelf life, costing money to prop them up that could be spent on education.

And the students and staff deserve a better learning environment than buildings that are old and sometimes decrepit. Certainly the recession and loss of tax revenues have played a part in this debacle and they are beyond the government’s control but that's not the whole story.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has suggested that Treasury plans imply fiscal tightening building up to the equivalent of £90bn over the next eight years. Some of that inevitably involves savage cuts in the government’s capital spending and the FE college programme is likely to be the first of many cut-backs despite promises to bring forward construction to help address the collapse in the sector.

But the recession is just one factor in this debacle. There is also an air of mismanagement about the programme that does little to foster confidence going forward.

The whole sorry story is basically a dreadful waste of time, effort and money.