PLANS to bill schools for the huge costs of becoming academies could save Bradford Council more than £5m, council bosses have said.

An increasing number of schools are making the switch away from local authority control, but currently the council pays for all the necessary legal and administrative work each time.

As this can amount to between £30,000 and £40,000 per conversion, council bosses say they fear the situation will get untenable unless they start charging the schools.

Education chief Councillor Imran Khan said there were 140 maintained schools in the district with the potential to become academies in future.

“Multiply that by £30,000 to £40,000 each time, and it’s a substantial amount, so for us it’s a route we have to explore,” he said.

Cllr Khan said many other local authorities had already gone down the route of billing schools for conversion costs, adding that the Department for Education gave schools some funding to cover such expenses.

He said with the authority’s budget being halved from £600m to £300m over a decade, “something’s got to give”.

He said: “All the salami-slicing, all the efficiency savings, all that has been done so we are really at a point where we have to consider which services to stop providing.”

The opposition Conservatives’ education spokesman Councillor Debbie Davies said not only did she agree with Labour’s proposal, she believes she gave them the idea.

Cllr Davies said she had suggested such a move during a speech at a full council meeting in July.

She said: “I said that some local authorities had decided to pass on the costs to schools that convert to become academies and perhaps that’s an option we should consider.”

Cllr Khan said: “I certainly don’t remember Cllr Davies suggesting it but if she did, I’m grateful for her support.”

The Department for Education did not respond to requests for a comment on Bradford Council's plans, but a council report says the DfE believes any charges imposed by local authorities "must be reasonable".

Currently, there are nine primary academies and five secondary academies in the district.

A further 30 schools have applied to convert - 24 primaries, five secondaries and one special school - with more expected in the future.

The new proposal to introduce charges will go before the council’s decision-making Executive on Tuesday.

But the changes will not address a second long-running concern of the Labour-led council, that when schools become academies, any debts remain with the council while any surplus money goes with the school.

Cllr Khan said this could saddle the council with between £4m and £25m of school debts.

But Cllr Davies questioned how local authority-maintained schools have been allowed to run up such deficits in the first place.

“How are they ever allowed to go into debt?” she said.