The cancellation of 40 secondary school re-building projects could result in Kent County Council and contractors losing millions of pounds, it has emerged.

Kent County Council leader Paul Carter (Con) said he would be pushing the government to compensate the authority and contractors who now risked significant losses after wide-ranging cuts were announced to the Building Schools for The Future programme.

Kent was one of the biggest casualties of the cull, with £650million of planned investment ditched, affecting 40 schools and eight academies.

Mr Carter said the sums involved in drawing up and developing schemes were significant and ran into millions of pounds.

"We played by the rules of the Labour government and managed to attract some £400million investment in a highly complex and bureaucratic way of doing things.

"That has obviously delivered us costs that have yet to be met. We will have to have a dialogue with the government about how we get compensated for that expenditure.

"That is not just in the public sector but contractors and architects who have designed buildings that are now not going to get built."

He added that consortia who tendered for contracts often spent millions bidding.

"The tendering costs for preferred bidders who get to the final stage of various waves of the programme are something in the order of £4million to £6million... they are substantial sums of money.

"That is the way the scheme was engineered and designed."

County education chiefs recently warned that the cancellation of BSF schemes could leave the council with "significant abortive costs" associated with preparing bids for money and consultancy fees.

Earlier this year, we revealed how KCC had already had to pay consultants a total of £11.8million for developing BSF schemes, with fees being paid to a host of lawyers, designers and technical advisers involved in advising the education authority.

Of that, some £8million has been paid to technical consultants involved in feasibility studies and drawing up business cases; close to £2million to financial experts who have drawn up tender documents and £1.5million to lawyers, chiefly for negotiating and drawing up contracts and for dealing with a transfer of contracts to a new private sector partner.

Read Paul's blog on this and other political news here>>>