Events have moved rapidly since the Health and Safety Executive announced on Thursday that Raac concrete was now “life-expired”, and “liable to collapse with little or no notice”. The Department for Education (DfE) has moved to close more than 100 schools that contain the material, citing fears about safety ahead of the present academic year. And politicians, the public and the media are trying to get answers about how such a serious safety situation could have developed seemingly from out of nowhere.
As a professor of construction engineering and materials at Loughborough University, I’ve been studying Raac in buildings in Britain – mainly in the NHS – for several years now. It has been on many people’s radar for a while. Over the past few days there have been many somewhat overblown ideas circulating about the dangers of Raac: that it is a fundamentally flawed material, that it only lasts a few decades, or that it is something like “an Aero bar” in terms of strength. These are worth pushing back on. But, at the same time, there are real dangers posed by buildings with poorly constructed, degraded or poorly maintained Raac. And, if anything, the discussion so far has often underplayed the scale of Raac-containing buildings around the UK.
