Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete: Public Buildings

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As the noble Lords knows, there is of course a legal framework for managing asbestos through the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and I refer to the expert advice and involvement of independent building experts that have played a very important part in identifying RAAC in places such as hospitals and managing that in a responsible way.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, the test of a good Government is not whether a crisis pops up on their watch that they have to deal with but how Ministers respond. There are two options—you can roll up your sleeves and get on with it or you can dither, delay, cut funding and blame others while expecting to be thanked. As the scale of the schools problem emerges, and given that the Government cut Building Schools for the Future funding, the Minister said just now that the Cabinet Office wrote to all government departments in 2019. Can she tell the House whether the Government now have a grasp of the extent of the problem to which courts, hospitals and other buildings used by the public are affected by this? If they have, given that the letter went out in 2019, when will that information be published?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Actually, we have rolled up our sleeves in this case, to quote the noble Baroness. We wrote in 2019, and again in 2022 after Covid. A great deal of management on a risk-based basis has been undertaken across the public sector, drawing on professional expert advice, because it is very important that that is done. More recently, in June 2023, the Cabinet Office set up an expert working group under the OGP to look at RAAC. Of course, that has been meeting very frequently since the information, which has been the subject of other Question sessions, became available in schools in August.