Your leader article (“Adding up for the academically challenged”, 20 March, page 3) makes a huge, and incorrect, assumption

Whatever calculations BAM Construct might have made about the cost of delays to the Learning and Skills Council’s college rebuilding programme, £2m per project per month is not being paid to 144 teams of consultants “to do nothing”.

On the contrary, large teams of consultants geared up to work on large, fast projects have been told to suspend work immediately, with no indication of when projects might restart.

There are clearly massive financial problems with this rebuilding programme which we hope will be addressed soon by the Foster report; meanwhile, to suggest that the government is burning up £288m a month simply adds to the confusion and bears no relation whatsoever to the difficulties faced by consultants working on this programme.

Roger FitzGerald, ADP Architects

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