The Sky News web site includes this observation:
During the post-war building boom of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, reinforced aerated autoclaved concrete (RAAC) was something of a wonder material.
Filled with bubbles of air, the material is about a quarter of the weight of normal reinforced concrete.
RAAC was seen as ideal for shaping into lighter, pre-formed concrete components used in the modern lego-like construction of many public buildings of the time.
As we now know, RAAC does not last.
As far as I know, no one ever claimed it would. Like all building materials, it was known to have a limited life. But such things are always ignored in the UK, where we assume, for reasons that are exceptionally hard to justify, that buildings will have an infinite life.
Except that they don't.
So now we have an RAAC crisis.
That is not the fault of RAAC.
Nor is it the fault of those who specified the use of it, because it appears to have safely delivered on the promise made.
Those who are are fault are the current politicians who decided to ignore the issues RAAC gave rise to, like the fact that schools and hospitals built with RAAC were always intended to have a limited life after which they would inevitably need replacement.
The replacement date for many RAAC buildings is now in the past. But replacement has not happened.
That is the fault of this government, which has at the heart of its thinking the idea that life is brutal and short, which thinking is entirely consistent with leaving RAAC in use until now.
What will happen as a result of this crisis? I predict three things.
First, the Tories will try to blame it on Labour.
Second, they will defer matters by announcing a wholly unnecessary enquiry.
Third, the buildings will stay in place.
This is the standard mechanism for Tory denial.
What actually needs to be done? We need a rapid programme of RAAC replacement, of course. But Labour will also claim there is no money for that.
Meanwhile, broken Britain will look just that bit more broken, and all because of our broken political system that does not require that either major political party face up to economic reality.
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Like everything in British life, somebody will die (teachers and/or students) and there’ll be an ineffective short term underfunded response, that will involve contracts awarded to Tory donors. A pointless regulation will be created, there’ll be a dead end enquiry, there’ll be political posturing for fifteen seconds, and the caravan of vacuity will move on, till the next disaster.
The Romans would add pumice stone to the concrete to make it lighter. Some of their buildings -the Pantheon for example- are still standing.
Putting on my neo-liberal cynical hat, I suspect that the reason that pumice is not used in concrete today, is that you can’t make as much money as using a patented technology that used free thin air.
Neo-liberal policy putting money before practicality.
My favourite building! The concrete is around 1 metre thick at the outer edge of the dome and down to 30cm or so round the occulus, and it is towards the middle that pumice was used as the aggregate. However, Roman concrete used mortar from Porzelano near Napoli and not Portland cement. Apparently nobody is quite sure how they made their concrete, but it is stronger and much less brittle than our Portland cement based material. The Pantheon has no reinforcing, for example. Had it been made with our concrete it would have cracked and collapsed within a few years. The Eastern Empire general Belisario took all the gilded bronze tiles off the roof of the Pantheon around 600 AD and took them to Constantinople. Fortunately, the Church replaced them with a lead covering, as it had become a church. Without that the ingress of water over the centuries would probably have destroyed the dome. The main doors are still the original Roman bronze doors complete with lock. Sadly the 220,000 lbs weight bronze frieze from the portico ceiling was ripped out on the orders of the Pope to be melted down to make Bernini’s baldechino over the altar in St Peters, and enough bronze left over for 100 canons for the papal army. The three Nubian granite columns on the far left of the portico are not original. They fell over and broke in an earthquake during the Renaissance. However the Romans did these things from a catalogue of building supplies, so 40 foot red Nubian Granite columns were a standard item. That meant they were able to find three identical columns in another Roman building in Rome and they were taken to repair the Pantheon.
The Parthenon is a dome and therefore under compression and less likely to collapse. RAAC was used as a beam and is subjected to compressive forces on the top and tensile forces on the bottom. It is always the tensile forces that give first in reinforced concrete beams.
Gargoyles were there to entice the pagans. Concrete itself is a nightmare with regard to environment.
The Romans also used lime castes in their cement, which is one of the reasons why the life span of their concrete is as long as it is.
I can see this being down to money (isn’t it always).
➡️ It will have been used in the first instance because it was cheap.
➡️ RAACs limited life-span was known (~30 years), but neo-liberalism says saving money is the best option.
➡️ It could have been rectified early, but it would have cost money. Another benefit for neo-liberalism.
➡️ Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) provide poor maintenance contracts (saving money for the trusts, another benefit of neo-liberalism).
➡️ PFIs are designed to be paid regardless of whether the school is used! Suddlenly the savings are not looking so attractive.
See also:
➡️ The Impact and Legacy of the PFI in UK Schools (2021) https://tinyurl.com/22ser2eb
➡️ PFI: Challenging overly expensive contracts (2021) https://tinyurl.com/29bbkm55
➡️ Private Finance Initiative: hospitals will bring taxpayers 60 years of pain (2011, The Telegraph) https://tinyurl.com/38bcbe2b
Thanks Ian
You are a naughty cynic but I like you. (showing my age here )
Seriously, didn’t Corbyn have a plan to buy out all the PFIs arguing that in the long run it would save money?
I think I know who he nicked that from….
Did Corbyn nick it, or was he being advised by someone?
In the early 2000’s in social housing, New Labour had its Decent Homes programme where things like new gas central heating and double glazing was fitted to update properties. There was also some work done on the non-traditional housing potted around the country too but not enough.
Non-traditional housing in this country is housing that was basically built after the war or in inter-war eras that was short life housing – it did not use block and brick work, but consisted of concrete panels that were bolted together quickly with metal fastenings. There were also houses made of cast iron panels – we have many of these and they are fine houses whose condition has weathered well with time and whose wooden fastenings have stood up too. These can be refurbished to a high standard. But these were more expensive than using concrete blocks and posts held together by metal fastenings. These ‘lego’ houses had names like ‘Unity’ and Airey’ or ‘Wimpey No-Fines’ (I kid you not!).
The homes built with concrete panels could only have a shelf life of 35 years, yet we still have them and now they are life expired almost twice over. Many have low pitch roofs which cause condensation and what has happened is that the metal fastenings have rusted and will fail to hold the load. I suppose the idea was to replace them with traditional brick houses at some stage. Such ‘system build’ homes were supposed to be interim measures.
The other issue is that thermally, these units do not work as they get older. You either have to put new brick skin around them or demolish. And you need a new roof. They are expensive to run but people do like the internal layouts and the locations.
Many of these designs were classified as defective/non-decent under the 1985 housing act by the SoS for housing. They are a pig to work on. And many tenants went on to take out their right to buy on these units as well.
We’ve arrived at this scenario because cheapening the cost of house building meant more could be built but in fact we were just taking short-term decisions without thinking of the long term consequences.
At the basis of this in my view is austerity policy – always present throughout our national life leading to a half-hearted commitment to sort things out on the cheap.
It’s also a political debacle – at one time Labour and the Tories were racing one another to build homes, and ‘system build’ units helped politicians to get the numbers but not the quality. And – according to the not very well known documentary ‘ The Great British Housing Disaster’ there was also corruption and further cost cutting by unscrupulous contractors and builders on sites.
Ronan Point – the flats that partially collapsed I think in the 60’s – brought attention to system build flats but the system build houses shoddily assembled around the country quietly aged and got worse. Units like these in cities were probably dealt with first but those in rural areas were left to linger on for longer and moulder.
And so, apparently then, the same short term thinking applies to public buildings too like schools.
And what sort of culture allows the commons to be so badly realised I wonder?
Look – we obviously live in a country that thinks that it is OK to do things of lower quality for most of the population. That most of us in this septic isle must make do and mend and be grateful for what we’ve got.
The pre-dominant value system is one that values wealth in terms of money and values the intellectual power and wisdom of wealth to make decisions like this, that come back to haunt us.
This country of ours is just a pathetic little island ruled by an elite who see the the rest of us as a hinderance. And increasingly, bloated by the gains they’ve been making since the post war period, and their growing political power and the technical advances they are funding, we are becoming increasingly irrelevant to them.
https://nonstandardhouse.com/quick-find-common-non-traditional-houses-uk/
Thanks PSR
English “democracy” is entirely power without responsibility. And Thatcher’s ingenious “generosity” in selling the system built council flats and houses to tenants under the Right to Cry amounted to selling and privatising the responsibility for insuring, maintaining, repairing and ultimately suffering from the massive flaws therein before they were recognised as money pits and health and safety hazards.
A lot of the system built houses were built to Parker Morris standards, weren’t they, nice and roomy, not like today’s rabbit hutches.
My husband designed CLASP schools in Northumberland in the 70s. Were they built from this RAAC, does anyone know?
Any builder building for councils used to have to agree to a clause which said they had to remedy defects. When did that stop?
I did an Architecture Degree in Bristol in the early 1970s and we were told that reinforcing would rust and fail, with implications for the concrete. Prestressed concrete would more or less explode he said, possibly even if anyone tried to demolish it: but I remember the comments as a gentle rumination, slightly regretful, not an objection to the building method…
How much responsibility lies with our Schools of Architecture? Were the architects and engineers all happy to build “temporary buildings” and sign off on current safety without looking at the future safety? Did they assume some “ongoing economic miracle” would pay for the buildings’ demolition and replacement? Did the privatisation of the Building Research Establishment in 1997 undermine it’s role?
We have dug minerals out of the ground, stripped away the living ecosystems, covered the ground with a layer of concrete, steel and tarmac,while filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. All who profited, but didn’t think, are culpable.
But undoing it all and rebuilding would cause more damage. RIBA have been talking of reusing rather than replacing as a climate strategy. What now?
While you were doing your degree, Maggie, my husband was a technician working on Rose Lane office block in Norwich for Norwich Union. It’s actually won an award for its brutalist architecture and is still standing, looking pretty much the same on the outside after 50 years. In fact they rent out offices in it now, and have the only roof-top garden restaurant in Norwich, so they say. I hope they worked out the stresses for that properly.
Shouldn’t have any problem with the insurance if anything goes wrong!
‘ The Great British Housing Disaster’ documentary (by Adam Curtis, 1984) is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmQgkdOcFbg – and includes a telling bit (at 14:00) from T Dan Smith, who after saying these system built blocks were not designed as good homes, in response to being asked what were they designed for, replies ‘Making money … and they made money in abundance…’ .
Says it all.
Our Friends in the North is back on, very appositely, with Alun Armstrong playing T Dan Smith.
Great series
I’ve just been re-watching Our Friends in the North. I live in Gateshead. The destruction wrought then is horrendous, but nothing like what is coming.
According to a more recent report, they have decided to act now after a beam in a school collapsed unexpectedly during the holidays. It was unexpected because ‘A beam that had no sign… that it was a critical risk and was thought to be safe collapsed’ – Schools Minister Nick Gibb
First, what a relief that it collapsed in the holidays and no-one was hurt.
Second, as it is known that the effective life of this matrial is 30 years, how can they possibly claim that they thought it was safe? Or don’t they think?
Third, given the above, why are only some schools currently affected? Why not every one that has this material?
‘A beam that had no sign… that it was a critical risk and was thought to be safe collapsed’
Perhaps there should be a sign; I mean this quite literally. Perhaps, just as we put “use by” labels of food, we should put “demolish by” or “replace by” plaques on buildings. We do something similar in other contexts, such as when we put weight limits signs on bridges.
Humans are incredibly bad about taking precautions against dangers they are not constantly reminded of. Someone once asked me “How will we know when climate change has reached a point where it becomes irreversible?” The answer is “we won’t!” Often we find ourselves in a situation analogous to one who is rowing downstream in a river in an uninhabited wilderness towards a waterfall. There will come a point where it will be impossible for him to row back but unless someone has put a physical sign on the bank there may be nothing in the immediate environment that tells him where that point is.
I rather like that …
Another knock-on effect of the Household Budget Doctrine. If only a fixed amount of money is believed to be available, more eye-catching projects will always get priority. Should we open a book on when “lessons will be learned” and a second book on when they will be forgotten again?
Taking a Keynesian view of how an economy works, building or rebuilding infrastructure would be seen as a great economic and social opportunity, as Old Sleepy Joe seems to recognise.
This issue was raised in Newsnight last night and the Labour spokesperson refused to commit to increasing the maintenance budget from around £3 billion now to the former 2010 level of £7 billion a year. This just shows how unrealistic Labor is in facing up to the facts…. dont mention climate change……t
Schools, and especially the number so far identified, are just the tip of the iceberg, the material has also been used (and probably still being used) in hospitals and many other public and private buildings. The final cost could be immense, let’s hope the cost doesn’t include someones life…
Expert explainer: What is Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) and why are people concerned about it?
By Professor Chris Goodier, an expert in Construction Engineering and Materials….
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2023/march/reinforced-autoclaved-aerated–concrete-raac/
The above article includes a video from an ITV News feature about RAAC from 5 months ago which can be viewed here…
Children at risk in schools where concrete could collapse ‘with no warning’ | ITV News
‘ITV News has found 68 schools have Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) – a potentially dangerous, lightweight, building material that was predominantly used in roofs between the 1960s and the 1980s.
The true number is likely to be higher, as our freedom of information request to 5,882 schools in England has revealed 1,466 schools built between the 1960s and the 1980s do not know whether they have RAAC, because they haven’t been checked.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6MN6-VsGgM&t=1s
Do we know If RAAC refers to Wimpey No fines?
Limited life concrete and a flat roof (the norm, it appears for the use of RAAC) are a bad combination, unless there is a comprehensive, well-funded maintenance regime. It appears RAAC also has a shorter life span, which cannot be fudged. This is Britain, however; therefore the maintenance funding, or replacement programme will simply and inevitably fail. This is all quite predictable. Politicians, however do not predict or make wise longer=term provisions, they just survive elections: it is all they are clearly fit for, and politics has thus become a thoroughly stupid activity.
There is a deeper issue however, and it is a function of ‘accounting’. What any corporate or public institution does when it sets out to ‘account’ for its activities, using the medium of money as the measure; is to include only that which it receives in money, or what goods and services it pays for. The institution excludes everything else from consideration.
‘Everything else’ may turn out to be the direct consequences of its activities for generations into the future; all of it unaccounted for.
Think of the following industries, or technical or engineering innovations that I have simply drawn with little consideration required. All are allowed spillover consequences of their activities they do not require to account for, at all. None of the consequences of these industries are even contingent liabilities.
The fossil fuel industry, or the car industry (and the cost of climate change). Construction and engineering (cladding-Grenfell, RAAC, asbestos). The alcohol industry (alcoholism, drink and crime) . Think of the impact of fast-food operations on the amount of waste packaging littering our streets. Think of the food producing sector and supermarkets, and the amount of ultra high processed food bring produced.
All of this happens for two reasons. First, the peculiarly narrow, self-regulating selectivity that informs the principles of formal financial accounting. Second, is the lavish self-indulgence offered to anyone with an idea to inflict it on the public without let or hindrance through the implicit principle of ‘permissionless innovation’.
We now live with the horrendous consequences.
Curiously, I began today outlining an academic paper on this theme that I have now shared with colleagues
Given the usual timescale of these things it might appear in two to three years….
I have been circling round this same thought for some time; written, however from a historical perspective.
It would have been useful, back in the early 2010s while construction firms were floundering, to have employed them en masse on infrastructure projects such as these…
I’ll bet good money that none of the affected buildings next week are insured. There’s just no feedback from the assessors telling you it’s too risky to keep using. I blame Thatcher
It certainly goes back way before this government, or the coalition government of 2010 – yes, all the way back to Thatcher and her ridiculous “household budget” propaganda, that proved so persuasive with the voters that no mainstream politician dare challenge it.
Apparently the previous Labour government had a £55bn school-building programme, projects for 715 schools. I don’t know whether this would have helped schools with problems with concrete.
The Tories divided to “cancel over 700 new school buildings” (2010) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/08/michael-gove-cancelled-school-projects?CMP=share_btn_tw
While they are not without their problems and ‘long life’ buildings come with their own issues properly constructed brick and stone buildings seem to just keep on going.
Pity we cant do the same with modern materials
Scandinavian style timber frame houses seem to last longer than 30 years.
Peterborough development corporation houses were timber framed in the 70s and have lasted, according to friends I have there still.
Prefabs built after the war in Hull, where 90% of housing had been bomb-damaged, were only supposed to last for 10-15 years and then be replaced, but I know some were still there in 2000, and quite habitable. I know someone who wanted to stay in hers until she died. They had to build quickly then, as there was a shortage of housing, materials and manpower.
I wonder if a lot is to do with the mindset of the architect and builder, and whether they have pride in what they construct.
Not an expert on concrete but would like to add that its not just Thatcher, or this government or accountants. It’s always governance, that’s why constitutional change and specifically devolution is needed to fix broken Britain. This is a first order problem that is needed to unlock all other solutions.
My aunt lived in a “prefab” on Inglemire lane until the 1990’s, at one point is was refurbished which extended its life. As I recall she liked it.
Poor quality for “vernacular” buildings is not new, the blitz revealed the widespread problem caused by Jerry building.
Accounting is not perfect but it also also has a balance sheet where assets and depreciation are covered and with a cash flow can provide data on life time cost of ownership (if one wishes to use it).
As ever problems arise because of governance issues and people acting quasi-religious beliefs, ideological conviction or anything except the facts to make decisions.
Slums were cleared by decree with little consultation – communities were destroyed. My grandma live in a perfectly serviceable house in Argyle Street, the whole area was demolished, it’s now a car park for Hull Royal Infirmary. Soulless council estates with no amenities and few local shops more issues, add in deindustrialisation then ignore the areas deindustrialised and hey-presto; Thatcher, Brexit, Populism.
Capitalism itself isn’t against quality defined as “fitness for purpose”. Problems occur when accountants are put in charge, when “aggressive accounting” is used to avoid tax, when “financial engineering” is used, and profit maximisation is the top, or is the only priority. In short when ownership is free of the responsibility of ownership. John Harvey Jones identified the problem that there were not enough technically proficient managers in board rooms of large companies – as I recall he lamented putting the score keepers in charge which would only cause decline.
Governance and accountability is what it always boils down to – anything for me without me is against me.
Brian, I probably used to pass your gran’s on my way to catch the bus to get to Tranby.
Before that I went to Thomas Stratten, so north of the railway line but next to it, so the wrong part of Argyle Street. The hospital that you speak of needed a car park, although my mother walked there to work from Louis Street. Initially the houses you speak of were slums, as they were opposite the workhouse. The hospital was the workhouse hospital in 1908 (Godfrey maps, not memory). The main part of the hospital site was the workhouse, which was three times bigger than the hospital.
The Gordon Brown administration had a project to refurbish schools and build new ones. That was scrapped along with the Schools Sports programme. I believe our old friend Gove was responsible for the vandalism. The Brown sports programme was one of the reasons Great Britain did so well at the London Games in 2012 and subsequently. In his book Nye Bevan wrote about the free marketeers hating planning. They love the excitement of chaos. They hate planning and regulation of any sort. That was the whole point of Brexit. Alas, the philosophy is a recipe for devastation. The cost of this will be enormous. The responsibility lies with the Thatcher revolution which ushered in the marketisation and the chaos. The Tories have ruled for all but 13 years since 1979. It will not be easy to blame Labour for this tragedy.
Unless Labour accept the blame along with the ideology and refuse to invest in renewal of public services and resources.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/04/england-crumbling-schools-rishi-sunak-repairs-civil-servant
So Sunak knew of the problems when he was chancellor and refused to allocate the money to fix it. Sunk now.
The Tories send their children to Public Schools. Haven’t seen Eton shutting because of RAAC. The Tories don’t give a sh*t about normal people and never experience the deprivations reeked on normal society by their oppressive policies. Don’t expect the Tories to do anything about RAAC – let the plebs suffer! If one wants to avoid collapsing schools, then one can just send one’s children to Eton or Harrow. Not that difficult is it?!
This erudite technical debate has run logically to raising historical political contexts as partial explanations or at least provided insights to the gathering confidence of the neoliberal, de-regulating free-market ideology of the political elite that has dominated the Thatcher and post Thatcher years.
Hiding in plain view is their prime project, the shrinking of the welfare oriented State. No conspiracy required when the ideological culture that sustains the above is so well established and maintained by a right-wing Press, a Tory party replete with arrogant opportunists enriching themselves of public resources and a Labour Party cowering until it’s ‘buggins turn’ to keep the seats warm on the Westminster carousel.
Wake up Britain! Our cherished public health, education, housing, transport, and access to law and security services are disappearing before our eyes. Even our limited practice of democracy is crumbling.
The collapse of a state school’s roof is a wake-up ALARM! that must galvanise us to ACT! It must not become simply yesterday’s news.
“Surveys have been conducted to confirm that no Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) is present in the Departmental corporate estate.
National Health Service trusts have conducted extensive building survey works to identify the presence of RAAC in their fabric, using technology to record potential issues and visually identify and log potential risks. There are 22 NHS bodies with RAAC plank construction in the whole or a significant part of their estate. We have allocated a total of £685 million for mitigation works in all the affected trusts up to 2024/25. We are allocating funding annually, based on NHS trust plans and delivery progress. In the last financial year, £210 million was allocated to NHS hospital trusts to manage RAAC issues on their estates.
We have committed to eradicating RAAC from the publicly owned NHS estate by 2035, protecting patient and staff safety in the interim period, with the NHS approaching this on a ‘risk basis’ and prioritising NHS trusts of concern.”
Can anyone understand this? It was a written response by Will Quince on 24th July.
How can they eradicate it by 2035 when there isn’t any there according to the first paragraph.
Bizarre
And how much will fall down by 2035?
Perhaps “Departmental corporate estate” does not include the NHS Trusts. Then you have to ask whether everything in the estate is either in the Departmental corporate estate, or an NHS Trust. You can never quite trust the plain meaning of terms (read a legal contract; lawyers define the terms they use, politicians and the civil service don’t).
That’s what I wondered. But then, what is the difference between “Departmental corporate estate” and “publicly owned NHS estate”?
King’s Lynn hospital is held up by 3600 roof props. It will cost £862 million to rebuild by 2030.
It doesn’t make sense.
jenw, let’s develop the thought. Could it be we are missing something the official wording does not mention but has squirrelled away, not captured by the presented data, and therefore out of sight? Could PPP/PFI be a factor here? Here is an overview of PPP/PFI:
“PPP in the UK: 22 years of experience; More than 130 healthcare PPP projects; £12 billion of capital value” (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-private-partnerships/public-private-partnerships).
I think the problem is that I tend to think of the NHS in the round, not as buildings separate from people. You can’t have an NHS without buildings or people, or drugs and research. I think all of them should be paid for out of the same pot.
The strange thing about this is that I am sure I heard about the problem decades ago, I’m not sure exactly when but it would have been before 2001 when I moved from one employer to another. I hadn’t thought about it again until recently but if I had I would have assumed something had been done about it by now.