Tim Byles

Tim Byles is the former chief executive of the government's school building agency, Partnership for Schools.

THe Daily Mail reported in July 2010 that one of Michael Gove's "first acts on becoming education Secretary was to scrap Mr Byles's £40,000 bonus as part of the Government's blitz on quangos."

Details of Byles' salary were published in the Sunday Times in July 2010, shortly after Education Secretary Michael Gove was criticised for publishing an erroneous list of school building programmes:

THE £216,000-a-year quango chief at the centre of the school cuts debacle is set to lose his job as Michael Gove, the education secretary, prepares to face a fresh Commons onslaught.

Tim Byles, chief executive of the body in charge of school building programmes, is being blamed by Whitehall sources for the series of errors which forced Gove to make a humiliating Commons apology. A government dossier was passed to The Sunday Times this weekend drawing attention to the size of Byles's salary and the £30m annual cost of his quango's sprawling bureaucracy.

The move was seen as a strong signal that Gove was preparing to axe Byles and to scrap Partnerships for Schools (PfS), his quango.

Architects Journal reported that "the leak came a day before Gove made a humiliating apology to the Commons as a result of the BSF-list fiasco."

The Sun reported on 17 July 2010 that Byles had been due to earn £110,000 more than David Cameron until ministers scrapped a £50,000 bonus.

At an Education Select Committee hearing later that month, Byles said: "I told the Department (for Education) that they should check with local authorities, but this advice was not followed. We advised that it would be better to validate the data."

The Press Association reported:

Mr Byles told the committee this advice had been given because PfS is required to hold data only on schools that have reached the procurement phase of works. While they also have data on schools that local authorities would like to enter the BSF programme, this information is ``fairly fluid.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Byles told Labour MP Nick Raynsford that he believed his phone had been hacked during the controversy:

At the time, he was the subject of a series of negative media reports which he allegedly believes were orchestrated by Mr Coulson.

Yesterday, a Department for Education spokesman confirmed that Mr Byles had raised concerns about “phone tampering” and calls when “no one actually spoke to him”.

Sir David Bell, permanent secretary of the department, has written to Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, to say that the civil servant “suspected his mobile phone had been tampered with, for the purpose of intercepting calls”.