Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Barran on 20 January (HL4717), when they first became aware of serious safety issues concerning the use of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete; and whether these safety concerns include an imminent risk to life.

Nothing is more important than the safety of children and staff. It has always been the case that where the Department is made aware a building may pose an immediate risk, immediate action is taken. It is important for young people to be in classrooms with their friends and teachers, but their safety must always come first.

The Government has taken more proactive action to identify and mitigate RAAC in education settings than the devolved administrations in the UK, or indeed, governments overseas. The Office of Government Property wrote to all Government Property Leaders in 2019, and again in September 2022, highlighting safety alerts on RAAC and signposting guidance on identification and remediation. The Department has been talking to schools about the potential risks of RAAC since 2018 when we first published a warning note with the Local Government Association. The Department published guidance on identifying and managing RAAC in 2021 (updated 2022, and 2023).

Since then, Government departments have been surveying properties and depending on the assessment of the RAAC, decided to either monitor it, prop it up, or replace it. This is in line with the approach recommended by the Institution of Structural Engineers.

Guidance to schools since 2018 has been clear about the need to have adequate contingencies in place for the eventuality that RAAC-affected buildings need to be vacated at short notice. The Department began a programme working with the sector to identify and manage RAAC in March 2022, extended to colleges in December.

The Department discovered details of three new cases over the summer, where RAAC that would have been graded as non-critical had failed. The first of these was in a commercial setting. The second was in a school in a different educational jurisdiction.

It was right to carefully consider the cases and scrutinise the technical details from these. The Department’s technical officials were able to investigate the situation in one case where the plank that had failed was fully intact as it was resting on a steel beam after it failed. They concluded that it would previously been rated non-critical.

Ministers were carefully considering the first two cases, and advice from officials, when a third failure of a panel occurred, at a school in late August. The Department’s technical officials also visited this school to investigate the failure. In light of all three cases, it was right to make the difficult decision to change Departmental guidance for education settings and take a more cautious approach.

Following careful analysis of these recent cases, a precautionary and proactive step has been taken to change the approach to RAAC in education settings ahead of the start of the academic year, as outlined in our guidance.