Tory leader David Cameron has challenged Prime Minister Gordon Brown to visit the stalled £30m redevelopment at Abingdon and Witney College.

Mr Cameron, MP for Witney, used the case of the campus in his constituency to highlight the gap between the Government’s stated commitment to support the unemployed and its failure to ensure that new further education colleges were built to help retrain people who had lost their jobs.

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Cameron said: “One hundred and forty four of our further education colleges – the exact organisations we need to retrain people who are unemployed – are having their building projects halted.

“There is this enormous gulf between what he (Mr Brown) says every week and what his Government are actually doing.”

Mr Cameron told Mr Brown: “You should come to my constituency of Witney, where people are in temporary classrooms because the whole building project has had to be abandoned because of his incompetent Government.”

The Tory leader said Abingdon and Witney College was paying £40,000 a month for 57 temporary cabins into which all 600 full-time students, plus staff, on its Witney campus had been moved since September.

As reported in the Oxford Mail last week, the college had been expecting final approval for its £30m plan to dismantle and rebuild the ageing campus in December.

But the scheme, along with 78 others across the country, has now been put on hold after the Learning and Skills Council was overwhelmed with funding applications.

Mr Brown said that the Government was spending £110m this year on FE colleges – as part of a total investment of £44bn on health, education and other capital investment projects “to help us through this downturn”.

He added: “The problem is that (Mr Cameron) asks us to do more, but he is the only opposition leader in history who is asking us to do more when saying he will spend less – it just does not add up.”

In Witney, people supported Mr Cameron’s calls for the Prime Minister to visit.

Steve Billcliffe, director of development at the college, said: “I think it would be good for him to interview some of the students. It’s their futures which are at stake as much as anything else. They are coping with the temporary classrooms, but they are not exactly an ideal, long-term solution.”

Mr Billcliffe said it might also be nice for Mr Brown to meet the construction workers and local suppliers for the shelved project.

He added: “For some of these people they were relying on this two year contract for the development of the college.”

Hazel Young, 17, a design student at the Witney campus, said: “Maybe if Gordon Brown came down here and saw what the state of the campus was like he would change his mind.”

Childcare student Chantelle Day, 17, added: “Come on Mr Brown. Come and see what it’s like for us.”

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