Sandwell Council has won a legal battle forcing the Department for Education (DfE) to disclose why it refused to sanction £125m funding to rebuild and refurbish nine schools.

In what the council claims is a landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOI) ruling, the Information Commissioner has determined the public interest in the DfE releasing the department's reasoning outweighs the need to keep the formulation of government policy exempt.

On coming to office, Coalition education secretary Michael Gove scrapped the Labour Government's £45bn Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) - the most ambitious schools capital grant programme in 50 years that promised to rebuild every secondary school in England.

Mr Gove replaced it with the five-year Priority School Building Programme, which has a £2bn capital grant budget to refurbish 261 schools which applied to the scheme.

Sandwell was one of six authorities to launch a judicial review against the decision, but in February 2011 a judge found in favour of the government on the substantive issues.

The ruling comes nearly 18 months after Sandwell first made a FOI request to the department seeking to obtain emails and notes relating to the decision to scrap the funding.

After the DfE refused to comply, Sandwell complained to data watchdog the Information Commissioner, which twice upheld the government's right to withhold the information before the most recent ruling.

Information commissioner, Christopher Graham said he recognised the BSF policy and its termination involved substantial expenditure of public money.

‘Abolition of the programme necessitated further considerable payments from the public purse in order to settle the contractual liabilities of a number of public authorities,' Mr Graham stated.

In additional to national debate and general public interest, Mr Graham said there was also considerable debate and interest in particular local areas where the programme was being used to renew and rebuild a large number of schools.

He also said there was a strong public interest in understanding a decision that cold affect the quality of school provision and educational experience of students.

‘Increasing public understanding of all the issues involved would therefore be in the public interest,' Mr Graham added.

Sandwell leader, Cllr Darren Cooper said he genuinely wanted to know why the authority's BSF schemes were axed.  ‘Was it something we did or didn't do? 'Cllr Cooper said.

‘It was surely in the public interest to tell us but the government decided not to come clean,' he added.