"Critical risk to life:" Sunak refused to fully fund repairs of England’s crumbling schools when he was chancellor, says ex-official
"Critical risk to life:" Sunak refused to fully fund repairs of England’s crumbling schools when he was chancellor, says ex-official
PM shown evidence of ‘critical risk to life’ when chancellor, says former top civil servant at Department for Education
Amid a mounting political and educational crisis over schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) from the 1950s to 1990s, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, said it was still not known how many might be affected, and how many might need to close, with engineers still to inspect more sites.
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One point I'd make from an earlier thread on the topic -- it sounds like RAAC panels were used in a number of countries. It may be that the UK is particularly affected due to having quite a bit of rain -- it's moisture that does the damage.
But it may also be that the UK is being relatively-proactive. Almost all the articles I see talking about this are in the UK. I wasn't able to find articles elsewhere saying "yeah, we looked into this, but it's not an issue in our country because X".
We don't use it much in the US, but it looks like there is at least some out there, and I haven't seen articles here saying "yeah, this is what the Brits are worried about, and we identified the buildings where it was present here and have determined that it's not a problem".
And use of the stuff is apparently common in mainland Europe, and I see no (English-language) news articles on it there.
So it may well be that the British response -- whether it should have been faster or not -- is, in fact, the response that's actually moving the most-quickly.
Heh. Well, even if one takes a really hard-cynical position like that, it'd probably be preferable to have it fixed than ignored. I'm saying that the UK isn't unique in using it, but is unusual in the attention being paid to it.
predicted lifetime of 30 years
My understanding is that the reduced 30 year lifetime was something determined in the 1990s after the material had already been used in construction for some decades, that the short estimate was based on the rate of degradation observed. That is, the basic problem wasn't people intentionally choosing a material that they knew to have a short lifetime, but in a new, experimental material having some serious issues that weren't originally recognized when it started being used.