Birmingham BSF decision delayed again

The race between Catalyst Lend Lease and Land Securities Trillium for the Britain’s second-largest Building Schools for the Future programme has been pushed back to October.

Birmingham council was to have chosen a preferred bidder for the £1.2bn project to overhaul the city’s 75 secondary schools this spring, but that was put back to the summer. It is now not expected until next month.

A spokesperson for the council said: “The delay is simply due to the size of the project and the negotiations we are going through. We will definitely make a decision at the end of next month.”

The race for the 10-year deal was reduced to two in March when Galliford Try’s E-pact consortium and the Transform Schools bid vehicle dropped out.

Land Securities Trillium is preferred bidder on the country’s largest BSF project in Kent where the county council hopes to invest £1.8bn in its secondary schools by 2014.

The delay is simply due to the size of the project and the various negotiations

Birmingham council

Meanwhile, in his speech to a fringe meeting at this weekend’s Labour party conference in Manchester, Ty Goddard, the director of the British Council

for School Environments, is expected to call for further changes to the £45bn BSF programme.

He will suggest that an “independent panel of experts on design, teaching and learning” be established to ensure “teaching and learning is at the heart of the [design] process”.