Market overview

摘要

Steel has always enjoyed a strong demand from the education sector for schools, sports halls, further and higher education buildings and student accommodation. The sector was very vibrant for a few years before 2010 when England's £55,oooM Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme of secondary school building, overseen by Partnerships for Schools, was cancelled. Also brought to a halt was a parallel £1,900M Primary Capital Programme for primary school building that had envisaged some 675 projects being ordered over three years. Times have often felt testing ever since. Much of this work was funded under Private Finance Initiative schemes which were gaining in unpopularity with government, and the BSF organisation had been criticised by parliamentary spending watchdogs the National Audit Office. Some 123 Academy school schemes were to be de-prioritised and reviewed on a case-by-case basis.