In spite of the crass information video from education secretary Gilian Keegan, there is more depth to the “crumbly concrete” story than perhaps meets the eye.
Before going anywhere with it, though, I find myself ruminating on the bigger picture as I recalled that, dotted up and down the country, there are numerous aircraft hangers dating from the 1920s and 30s which are still in use and in good condition.
For all their modernity at the time, though, these substantial structures were built from traditional materials, using conventional building techniques. And yet, here we are in the throes of a crisis over collapsing school buildings, some built in the 1980s, to say nothing of the hospitals and other public buildings constructed at the same time.
Yet the school etc., story stems from the same wellspring as the Ronan Point collapse in 1968, which brought to a halt the high-rise system building system which had obsessed governments and developers.
But it is the same story which brought us inflammable insulation used for cladding on Grenfell House and, in the same that has water authorities failing to meet leakage targets because they are using uPVC service pipes that have joints which last only fifty years, when the systems are supposed to last 100 years and more.
From fifty years ago now, I still recall during my training as a (then) public health inspector my building lecturer warning us against the use of untried materials and construction methods. We thought at the time that he was old-fashioned, but events have proved him right many times over. His warning could have saved governments and others billions of pounds.
In a sense, therefore, it is a tad unfortunate, if not downright unfair, that the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) crisis is being blamed on contemporary politicians when the material has been in use since the mid-1960s and was intensively used in school building in the 1980s, after which it turned out to have a safe working life of around thirty years.
One must ask which genius in the then Department of Education signed off the approval to use RAAC without commissioning extensive durability tests. It is that person (or team) who should bear the ultimate responsibility for the current crisis which others have been left to clear up. No doubt, the original progenitors of this crisis are currently enjoying well-funded retirements.
To be scrupulously fair, though, a comprehensive review of RAAC carried out by the US National Bureau of Standards and published in 1988 did not raise any concerns about durability, although there were multiple caveats about the effect of water penetration.
In fact, it could have been more thorough. As The Times tells us, Dr John Roberts, president of the Institution of Structural Engineers in the early 2000s, says RAAC should never have been used in any permanent buildings.
RAAC, he says, is particularly vulnerable when used in flat roof structures as the porous nature of the aerated concrete means that the smallest amount of water ingress will lead to serious corrosion of the embedded steel reinforcement.”
You were relying completely on what the manufacturers told you about it, he added, believing it was being mis-sold by manufacturers. Even in the 1970s, many engineers were suspicious of their claims. “Some of us”, he says, “in fact, quite a lot of us at the time, wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, not for structures, even though we all use it as blockwork”.
As to more recent experience we are reminded by The Times that, in 1995, a Somerset-based structural engineer warned of the use of RAAC constituting a “booby trap” hidden in the fabric of the nation’s schools.
This was followed in 1996 by a Building Research Establishment (BRE) advisory bulletin which describes the difficulties experienced in service with RAAC roof planks designed before 1980. It gave guidance on their identification and initial assessment in buildings and suggested that roofs incorporating pre-1980 RAAC planks were inspected, and their condition assessed.
Although the left-leaning Independent newspaper is keen to attribute the crisis to Conservatives governments, current and past – complaining that in 2010 the coalition led by David Cameron hastily scrapped the outgoing Labour government’s £55 billion schools building programme as part of its austerity measures – the timescale of the BRE bulletin cannot exclude the 1997 Blair government from some responsibility.
It took, however, the Blair administration until 2003, however, to launch the Building Schools for the Future programme but there was little progress on it, which led to Gordon Brown’s version in 2008. This iteration introduced a massive element of PFI, a type of financing that was already largely discredited. It is not surprising, therefore, that the coalition government cancelled it when it took over in 2010.
Nevertheless, the coalition government was far from idle on the school maintenance front, issuing its own policy document which, amongst other things, launched a priority school building programme investing an extra £2 billion in rebuilding and refurbishing school buildings in the very worst condition.
Nevertheless, the issue of RAAC seems to have remained relatively low key, emerging briefly from obscurity in July 2018 when Singlewell Primary School in Gravesend was forced to close after the ceiling above the staff room collapsed.
According to the New Civil Engineer Journal, in May 2019, this collapse prompted the Standing Committee on Structural Safety (Scoss) to issue a warning for buildings which used the same RAAC planks.
The report concludes that the collapse had occurred with little warning and that a similar, near failure was reported in 2019 in a retail unit which incorporated the same type of concrete planks.
The report added that the concrete planks in question – which had been popular in construction between the 1960s and 1980s – were much weaker than traditional concrete. As the lifespan of the planks was estimated to be around 30 years, Scoss recommended that all planks installed before 1980 were replaced.
The government response in respect of schools was not rapid, but there was a response in the form of the School Rebuilding Programme which stated in 2021.
By December 2022, there were 400 projects in the pipeline, with RAAC specifically included in the criteria which qualified for central government funding.
Oddly enough, though, in its annual report for 2022, the Department for Education didn’t seem too worried by RAAC, although it did have building safety in mind. There was, it said, a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools which are at or approaching the end of their designed life-expectancy and structural integrity is impaired.
Nut this was not RAAC. The risk predominantly existed in those buildings constructed in the years 1945 to 1970 which used “system build” light frame techniques.
Thus, we come to the present, with chancellor Jeremy Hunt telling us that the government has had an exhaustive process of going through every one of the 22,000 schools since 2018, following the Singlewell Primary School collapse.
What changed, it seems, is that “new information came to light” in the summer about heightened risks, understood to be the collapse last week of a structure made from RAAC which had been inspected and thought safe.
That, according to Hunt, has triggered action on 156 additional schools, with 104 being told last week to either move out or close some buildings. Given that a repair programme has already been in place since 2021, and action has been in hand since 2018, having to deal with just over 100 schools out of 22,000 on an emergency basis, because of new information on risk, doesn’t seem to be that much of a drama.
For sure, had the building industry and governments not been seduced by the prospect of cost-cutting by the use of new, untried materials, this need not have happened. But, for the moment, the school problem seems to be contained. We now await news of the thousands of GP surgeries, courts and other public buildings that are thought to contain RAAC.
Whether the long-term lessons will be learnt from this remains to be seen, but it is far too easy just to blame ministers for the debacle. There are lots of fingers in the pie.