RAAC in Scottish housing: early lessons for social housing providers in England

Image credit: Hillside housing, Girdleness Road, Aberdeen by Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The housing depicted forms part of the Balnagask Estate.

Reports that RAAC has been identified in over 500 dwellings in a single estate in Aberdeen present some lessons for those managing housing south of the border.

Aberdeen's famous nickname is “the Granite City”. Today, visitors and residents can enjoy views of Victorian architecture made of that material against the refreshing North Sea breeze and, with a coastal stroll, some spray.

In the middle of the 20th century, the County of the City of Aberdeen was doing what many public sector house-builders were doing across the UK: exploring the opportunities presented by new methods of construction, and leaving behind the granite heritage in favour of new materials, and in particular concrete. Aberdeen has made no small positive impact on architectural heritage in this regard, with eight blocks of flats having been awarded category A listing status by Historic Environment Scotland in 2021.

Unfortunately, as has now been made clear by the attention now paid to the risks presented by RAAC, such techniques and materials had a dark side. In an announcement which is staggering and depressing in scale, Aberdeen City Council has confirmed that “[t]o date we have identified circa 500 properties within the Balnagask area, that are understood to have RAAC construction panels within the roofs at the time they were originally constructed”, and this includes both flat-pitched roofs which were the initial focus, but also the innovative “mono-pitched” roofs which avoided blocking neighbouring views. These were constructed in the late 1960s.

This confirms some things we already knew: municipal specification, the type of housing (see picture above), and the period. While the Balnagask Estate has a number of blocks of flats, it appears that RAAC affects smaller housing, where one of the additional difficulties of RAAC presents itself, namely that it does not discriminate by height, and will affect a single-storey bungalow or primary school with the same deadly severity as a taller building.

The scale of the problem at Aberdeen City Council is new. Moreover, it is clear that even a municipal architectural department which has subsequently been recognised for architectural excellence may have erred in specifying RAAC. Aberdeen City Council's announcement and the associated reporting (linked above) makes clear that while the largest part of the 500 homes, 360, are owned by the local authority, there is a significant proportion - 142 - which are privately owned former Council properties. That presents a distinct public health challenge in mitigating and avoiding the risk of collapsing buildings where the local authority no longer has any legal ownership and private control over the building, which may be reflected in practical problems facing local authorities and Registered Providers in England.

Aberdeen City Council may be unique in terms of the scale of the problem, but it has been reported elsewhere that nearly 1,100 homes across Scotland have been identified as containing RAAC or being directly suspected of containing it. Aberdeen is not alone, and there is nothing peculiar about Scottish historical construction that means similar issues, hopefully at a smaller scale, will not be identified in England.