Schools: RAAC

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We have very good information on those issues. The noble Lord is right: it is extremely important that we establish that, and the Secretary of State was extremely clear in taking this decision that our operational response to support schools, which have been presented with a difficult decision at a difficult time in the school year, should be really well supported. For every school, we have a dedicated caseworker who co-ordinates all the strands of work that are going on to mitigate the RAAC. Then every school has a project director who is a technical expert; they will visit the school and work out with it the quickest mitigation plan. We have access to specialist classrooms and temporary classrooms for science. We have worked with the utility companies to ensure that the necessary energy, water and so on can be accessed, but there are some difficult cases. I am going on Monday to see a special school for children with profound disabilities. There are very significant requirements to make sure that those children also get access to the best education possible.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, RAAC was actually a popular building material in Europe and North America, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, yet those areas do not seem to have had the same kind of problems. The Financial Times quoted the head of engineering at the University of Alabama, who helped to bring the product to the US in the 1980s, as saying that there seemed to be

“specific issues in the UK … with design, production and construction”.

Clearly, we are going to see a large amount of new buildings coming into schools, while there have been systemic problems in the long-term past. Is the Minister confident that the buildings coming in to replace them will be adequate and reliable for the long term? What is the Government’s standard length of building life when constructing a new school?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the noble Baroness says, there have been suggestions—I think they are no more than suggestions and that it is a hypothesis—that what I call the recipe, which is probably not a very technical term for its technical specifications, for the RAAC that was manufactured in this country was potentially slightly different to those in other countries or that the installation of it was. There are questions about whether the overlap at the ends of the planks has been sufficient in all cases, but I would stress that those are just hypotheses as to why we face these problems.

The other issue is, genuinely, that we have been extremely proactive. We have spent the last 18 months working with schools. We were made aware in 2018 of the first plank failing at a school. Guidance was produced at that time and it has been updated regularly since. We have engaged with every school—98.6% of responsible bodies and schools in the country—to understand whether they have RAAC in their buildings, how they are managing it and whether they were mitigating the risk. It is through that proactive work that we identified these cases. On the design and production standards, we have been working closely with our chief scientific adviser in the department, who in turn has been working across government with CSAs in other departments, to ensure that our research and understanding of this building material and others is as high quality as it can be.