177: PAUL FOOT 2026: RAAC AND RUIN
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Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. My name is Lindsay Bruce and I'm part of the features team at the Aberdeen Press and Journal.
Fantastic. What's the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award this year?
The story that's brought me to the Paul Fitter Awards is our coverage of the RAC concrete crisis in Aberdeen and our campaign called Trapped by RAC.
So can you remind anyone who may have taken their eye off the story or not heard about RAC in the first place, what is RAC?
Rack basically means reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. The irony is it's not really concrete at all because of all these things but it means it's like a bubbly porous form of concrete. It looks like the inside of an aero bar if you were to break it in half and in a lot of buildings that were made post-war in new towns for example, huge council house and estates, rack was used in the roof panels and it was also used in some walls But in Aberdeen, certainly, we discovered that there were 500 homes that were made with rack. The rack was in the roof panels, as well as some public buildings as well.
And there are problems with rack, I believe, to put it mildly. Can you tell us about those?
Yeah, I mean, we refer to it as risky rack, crumbling concrete. In a nutshell, in about October 2023, it was revealed that rack was in a lot of public buildings. This is years after they had had alerts and warnings about school roofs coming down because They were made with wrack. The problem with wrack is it is porous and so it can absorb a lot of water over the years. So any building in the United Kingdom, but particularly places like Wales, the Central Belt and the north of Scotland, there's going to be a lot of water in the buildings. And so... When it was discovered that there was 500 homes in Aberdeen with rack in the roofs, the immediate issue was, are these roofs about to collapse on the people that are living in them, as they had done in some schools previously?
So that was the situation we had. It was November 2023 when the homeowners and council tenants were told there may be rack in your homes. And it wasn't until the following February, February 2021, for that they actually found out yes you have got racket in your homes and then from there on in calamity catastrophe and drama for all these people that were that were living in homes with roofs that could collapse at any moment i presume is extremely nerve-wracking to be told that to say the least um how did you start reporting the story So the newspaper started reporting it back then, October 2023. My involvement came, I'm part of the features team. And so my involvement came in about August 2024.
What is the RAC concrete crisis and its impact on homeowners?
And what happened there was I attended a church service in Torrey, the area that is most affected by RAC in our patch. And in a room of about 50 people, there were three women who were all about to be displaced to elsewhere in the city because their council house had racking it. And there were two families who were facing bankruptcy because their house had racking it. Now, this is when my part of the journey started. I pitched the idea that perhaps I could go and set up camp in Balnagask. maybe over two days, work from a community centre, let people know I was going to be there and see if we could tell one or two stories. Well, the reality is that from the second I set my computer up, I had a queue of people next to my desk and so it ended up being like a clinic, if you like, the way a politician would come and sit down and wait for people to come and talk.
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