Cash-strapped Liverpool Council has been quoted an astonishing figure to end a private contract for a 'ghost school' that hasn't had any pupils in it for five years.
The futuristic Parklands School in Speke has regularly made headlines because of an absurd situation that has left the council forking out £4m a year for the empty school.
The Speke facility opened in 2002 and was built under a £100m Private Finance Initiative (PFI) - organised between the city's then Liberal Democrat administration and Tony Blair's Labour government, which was a champion of such schemes.
Dwindling pupil numbers prompted the school's closure in 2014, but the nature of the finance deal means the council is tied into paying more than £4m a year until the contract ends in 2027/28.
Mayor Joe Anderson has described the deal as a 'millstone around his neck' at a time when his council has faced larger cuts than any other city authority in the country.
And he has been looking at potential ways to get out of the contract and to try and the state-of-the-art school into use as something else.
Voluntary termination
But it doesn't look good.
The council has asked its external advisors to estimate the cost of breaking the contract with PFI provider ESSL early.
Under a voluntary termination of the PFI agreement, Liverpool Council would be required to cover a number of areas of the contract including senior debt, swap breakage, shareholder compensation and potentially some subcontractor compensation.
They were told in March 2018 that the estimated termination would cost a whopping £34.1m, money the council cannot afford to fork out.
When asked for a response, Mayor Anderson said: "If anyone would have told you this is how the Parklands situation would turn out, they would have said you were making it up.
"It is absolutely obscene that a council hit by such massive cuts would have to pay £34m to being an empty school back into use."
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Hitting out at the Lib Dems, he said: "They did have a choice. I think the Labour government was wrong to support these schemes but no one forced the Lib Dems to do it, they could have done things differently."
He added: "We've built lots of schools and none of them were done with PFI."
There are a total of 12 primary and 4 secondary schools in the city that were built under PFI - with an estimated total contract cost of £367m.
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Despite Mayor Anderson's criticism, Lib Dem leader Cllr Richard Kemp said the Labour government at the time left his party with little option.
He said: "There was very little choice.
"It was either a new school via PFI or no school under the rules that were forced on us by Gordon Brown and the Treasury.
"Every single councillor including Mr Anderson as leader of the Labour Group voted for the project because Speke Comprehensive was clearly failing.
"Liverpool has less PFI involvement in schools than any other core City thanks to the way in which the Lib Dem administration always looked for alternative ways of funding. In this case there was no other source".
