Leading academic: ‘RAAC can easily last 50 years and should be able to carry on for several decades after that’

PA MEDIA

Many thanks to stewartb, Robert Martin and Bob Lamont for researching this for us.

According to BBC Scotland, a few hours ago:

More than half of the NHS buildings in Scotland which are suspected to contain a potentially dangerous form of concrete have not been fully inspected. The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow is among the sites identified in the desktop survey

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66900470

The QEUH was completed in 2015, 4 years after building had started in 2011.

RAAC had been stopped in new building by the mid-1990s, at least 15 years earlier. There is no RAAC in the new QEUH building but Scotland’s media love to feast on its supposed flaws as a proxy for supposed flaws in SNP government.

From a comment by stewartb, earlier today:

From The Guardian on 6 September, 2023, by Chris Goodier, professor of construction engineering and materials at Loughborough University’s School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering.

THERE IS NOTHING IN OUR RESEARCH THAT HAS SUGGESTED RAAC IMMEDIATELY FAILS AFTER 30 YEARS, OR THAT IT IS A UNIQUELY DANGEROUS MATERIAL. TV clips of Raac pieces being snapped in half are unhelpful. No material or building lasts for ever, and MUCH DEPENDS ON HOW IT HAS BEEN MANUFACTURED, INSTALLED AND MAINTAINED, AND HOW IT IS USED. Our research suggests that PROPERLY MAINTAINED RAAC CAN EASILY LAST 50 YEARS, AND SHOULD BE ABLE TO CARRY ON FOR SEVERAL DECADES AFTER THAT.’

For an earlier defence of the QEUH, see:

From Public Health Scotland (PHS), information on Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs) for the period October 2017 to September 2022.

Should any hospital have a higher mortality rate than that predicted, you would see a blue dot for it on or above the upper red line in the chart below. None has.

Notably, given the repeated attempts by opposition parties and their friends in the media to portray it as failing, Glasgow’s QEUH (extreme right blue dot) continues to perform, based on hard evidence and not Anas Sarwar’s shouty comments on TV, as one of the safest in the country.

11 thoughts on “Leading academic: ‘RAAC can easily last 50 years and should be able to carry on for several decades after that’”

    1. The answer is RAAC is nothing for the PUBLIC to worry about, contrary to the orchestrated media campaign contrived by whomever to cause panic.
      My hunch is deliberate political distraction, but also possible is :
      -Contractors contriving to force lucrative rebuild contracts under public pressure.
      -The “red-tape” and squeezing local authority budget obsession of Tories in England led to regular checks being skipped, so this is arse covering.

      Any structure which is not regularly checked over may develop an otherwise unseen fault.
      RAAC’s limitations were highlighted in the 1990s, it reacts differently to specific conditions which it’s traditional RC counterpart does not.

      Signs of potential distress will show up long before it becomes a major issue, but as it is over 30 years since RAAC was abandoned, any buildings with RAAC will be approaching if not already beyond their design life anyway.

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  3. Aside the rather obvious misdirection by BBC Scotland to implicate QEUH by photo rather than possible buildings inherited from the old Southern General hospital, the article itself is a monument to innuendo including the title hanging on “NHS buildings”. Boiler house, bin shed, garage…. ?

    The author makes no attempt in the first 4 paragraphs to back up any of the statements –
    “More than half of the NHS buildings in Scotland which are suspected to contain a potentially dangerous form of concrete have not been fully inspected.
    Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) could be present in up to 254 NHS buildings including hospitals.
    The Scottish government confirmed 97 buildings have been assessed since a review was ordered.
    The crumbly material can collapse without warning.”

    1 – Suspected by whom ? Someone in the Scotland Office who knows damned well a register of all public buildings in Scotland detailing where RAAC was used up into the 1990s is still parked in their archives ?
    Yet the outright and blatant lie here is “have not been fully inspected” – The NHS Boards are sticklers for good estate management and budget planning for maintenance – Regular inspections and reporting on condition of ALL their buildings is baked into that process.
    Secondly, the then Scottish Office in the the 1990s ensured all estate managers were notified of where RAAC had been used in which buildings, and that inspections pay particular attention to these components much as they did for asbestos.
    2 – Again, “could be” doing all the heavy lifting, and “including hospitals” tacked on the end.
    3 – The straw clutching is getting desperate here – Why is it so important to the media that SG must collate what local estate management have been doing religiously for the last 30 odd years ?
    4 – The material is NOT crumbly, the innuendo is…

    It’s a desperate distraction campaign to cover the ongoing farce in London, simples….

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  4. https://www.tutor2u.net/criminology/topics/moral-panic#:~:text=A%20moral%20panic%20is%20an,of%20society%20is%20falling%20apart.
    OK, given its the media, “moral” may not be quite appropriate. Many of the Unionist articles I read (one should always know what the enemy are thinking) seems to me to have been written with the conclusion in mind, whether its that the SG are dolts or independence would be a dystopian disaster, and then works back to some opening question, parachuting in evidence (whether distorted or even just not true) as required. RAAC is an example.
    The above notwithstanding, there CAN be problems with RAAC. For instance the Guardian includes, “MUCH DEPENDS ON HOW IT HAS BEEN MANUFACTURED, INSTALLED AND MAINTAINED, AND HOW IT IS USED”. Thus, the issue ceases to be RAAC but how it has been used and maintained. So RAAC improperly used or badly maintained can be dangerous. But if all you want is a nice easy sound bite club to hit the SG over the head with, that is a bit complex and long winded. Something simpler – RAAC is bad stuff and we need to be rid of it – is much better. Too many caveats – ANY caveats – weaken the panic (eg mods and rockers were the subject of a moral panic but all of them were bad, there were no nice ones). K I S S.
    This explanation is strenghtened by two aspects of the “story”. All of the buildings with or could have a RAAC problem precede devolution. Rather like the bedroom tax this is the media pressuring the SG to do something about a problem bequeathed them by London.
    Secondly we might ask, why now? For instance possible problems with RAAC havent been discovered in the last few weeks. The Guardian claims problems with how RAAC was being used (after all, it did save on costs) were recognised as long ago as the 1980s https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/04/raac-crisis-who-knew-what-when-crumbling-concrete-england#:~:text=April%202020%20%E2%80%93%20SCOSS%20published%20findings,risk%20of%20sudden%20shear%20failure%E2%80%9D.
    So why now, if not RAAC’s turn to be pressed into service by political expedience?

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  5. So if any issues are found in the buildings that were constructed using raac on Labours’ and Tories’ watch, the Uk London government will I’m sure pay to repair the damage or replace them. You know like the ‘refund and replace’ policy that shops used to have for faulty goods.
    Good article thanks John and researchers. 🙂

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