The terrifying hidden flaw that could render your home worthless

Daily Mail​

a day ago

A few months ago Lynn Winstanley received a text message in the middle of the night from one of her neighbours.
He was sitting in his car near Aberdeen harbour trying to decide whether to drive it into the sea.
A light touch on the accelerator would solve a lot of problems, he wrote. His wife would receive a life insurance payout.
He would no longer have to face questions from his children, such as 'where are we going to live?' Death would end his feelings of 'complete uselessness'.
Mrs Winstanley was awake when the message came because the anti-depressants and sleeping tablets she has been prescribed don't give her the respite she had hoped for after her own life was thrown into turmoil in 2023.
She called the man immediately and managed to 'talk him down'. He was not her only neighbour experiencing the darkest of thoughts.
Some have turned to drink – others to self-harm. In her part of the city there has been a dramatic spike in depression, anxiety, insomnia and stress-related chest pains.
It is said that, in a doctor's surgery in Torry, Aberdeen, staff now have a code word to identify those patients who must be given urgent appointments. They are the ones whose homes have been earmarked for demolition by the same city council which built them decades ago.
All are said to contain RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) – a cheap form of concrete widely used between the 1950s and 1980s and now known to carry the risk of collapse.
In Aberdeen, the RAAC houses are confined to one area. In Dundee, five residential pockets have been identified. There are more RAAC homes in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, and others in Angus. It's in Edinburgh, West Lothian and North and South Lanarkshire.
Quite how widespread it is in homes built on the cheap by local authorities across Scotland remains to be seen, although it is now estimated there are at least 5,500.
What have already been seen, however, are the devastating consequences of the RAAC issue on those living in affected properties – along with brazen attempts by local and national government to duck responsibility.
But a reckoning is coming, one Dundee campaigner on the issue warned this week.
'This is your next huge court case waiting to happen,' says Yvette Hoskins, 49. 'This is your next Post Office scandal. This is your next cladding scandal.'
Searching questions, she says, are about to be asked on who knew what when – and her own research has already uncovered uncomfortable answers.
At the heart of the scandal is an almighty financial shambles which cash-strapped local authorities cannot afford to put right, even if they are ultimately responsible for causing it.
It was they who commissioned the building of their housing stock – complete with substandard concrete – and they who later sold many of these homes to tenants under 1980s right-to-buy legislation.
Now, decades on, they have carried out audits of RAAC-affected properties they built but are taking no financial responsibility for the ones which have since passed into private ownership.
That is why householders such as the one who nearly drove his car into Aberdeen Harbour are in torment.
There was no mention of RAAC in the home reports when they bought their properties. But now that it has been identified, many are worth considerably less than the mortgages on them.
Aberdeen City Council plans to demolish more than 500 affected homes in the Balnagask area of Torry – including 138 privately-owned ones.
However, the sums it is willing to pay to buy back these properties to then bulldoze are only a fraction of their market value prior to RAAC issue arising.
In recent weeks, SNP co-leader of the council Christian Allard has upped the ante – suggesting structural engineers have told him 'no one should be in these houses another winter'.
North East Conservative MSP Liam Kerr says it leaves householders with a horrific dilemma: 'Stay in your house and the roof might fall in – or accept the lower price and move elsewhere with £40,000 or perhaps £50,000 of outstanding mortgage left over your head.'
It is, he says, 'a scandal which is destroying lives across Scotland'.
Mrs Winstanley, 63, one of the leaders of the Torry RAAC campaign group, is a case in point.
She and husband Andrew bought their one-bedroom flat in Farquhar Brae for £62,000 in 2022, then spent £20,000 on improvements.
Eighteen months later they learned the former council home had been identified as a RAAC property. Currently, she says, the local authority is offering between £20,000 and £30,000 to buy flats similar to hers to knock down.
'I'm now on anti-depressants and sleeping tablets,' she says. 'You just don't sleep, it's constantly going through your head. 'What's going to happen? Where are we going to go? Are we going to end up having to rent somewhere when we're mortgage-free at the moment?'.'
Dozens of other Aberdeen households are asking themselves the same questions. They are families at the lower end of the housing market, some of whom saved for years to put down a deposit on their first homes.
Now the council is urging them to abandon them, and accept a fraction of their previous value in compensation.
Aberdeen has already rehoused hundreds of tenants whose homes in Balnagask were still council-owned, dispersing them in other parts of the city and leaving many struggling to cope with the upheaval.
The more acute problem is the rump of owner occupiers that is now left. They are scattered randomly through the condemned estate, some of them the lone occupants in blocks of flats which were otherwise filled with tenants.
Until they leave, the blocks can't come down and a re-build cannot begin.
As the deadlock drags on, the area is becoming a ghetto as looters and fly-tippers move in. 'It's actually awful now,' says Mrs Winstanley. 'Stuff is getting dumped everywhere and houses getting ransacked.'
In desperation, a few have accepted the money offered by the council, just to escape the misery. One of them
was the motorist considering suicide. Another is a young schoolteacher who had to sell many of her possessions, including her car, to bear the loss of tens of thousands and start again.
'She's taken the money because her mental health can't take any more,' says Mrs Winstanley.
'And she's teaching our next generation.'
Seventy miles away in Dundee, more horror stories. It was just as the RAAC issue was arising that Yvette Hoskins and her husband Wayne put their three-bedroom flat on the market.
They had planned to sell earlier but when mother-of two Mrs Hoskins was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, they stayed put until she was in remission. Their advice was to market the first floor flat at offers over £105,000 but, after learning RAAC was present in the roof of the flat above them, they dropped that price by £5,000.
A couple fell in love with it and a deal was secured – only to fall through when no lender would give them a home loan. RAAC, it turned out, was the kiss of death for a mortgage deal.
'That's when we wholeheartedly understood that a property with RAAC will not sell,' says Mrs Hoskins. They dropped their price to £85,000 and received several offers – but all vanished when mortgages were refused.
Down in price it went again to £69,000, and then to £55,000, before a deal could be secured with a cash buyer.
With a £40,000 mortgage still remaining on the property, the couple will be left with next to nothing to show for their 15 years as owner occupiers once legal fees are settled. The campaign group they are part of has been backed by TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, who has a home in Dundee.
Like her fellow campaigner in Aberdeen, Mrs Hoskins highlights those less fortunate than herself – such as the Dundee man in his early 20s whose RAAC-affected property is now worth almost 40 per cent less than he paid for it.
'He can't move because any offer he got wouldn't cover his outstanding mortgage.
'He'd be going into negative equity through no fault of his own because nobody seemingly knew about RAAC in homes and properties until they were asked to inspect it by the Scottish Government in 2023.' Back then, a catalogue of public buildings, including schools, libraries, hospitals and community centres were already known to contain RAAC.
The lightweight cement, whose texture resembles an Aero chocolate bar, was used in buildings with flat or low-pitched roofs and, alarmingly, was considered to have a lifespan of only 30 years. When exposed to moisture it can become structurally unsound.
Repairs were ordered for public buildings, then the focus shifted to social housing – and the enormity of the issue began to emerge.
Not only were hundreds – and later thousands – of properties identified as containing RAAC, but many had been sold to private owners multiple times since the local authority built them. Almost none of their home reports had flagged up RAAC.
Yet a search of Dundee city archives reveals not only that the local authority knew about RAAC but that it was also aware of potential defects in it as early as the late 1970s.
That, points out Mrs Hoskins, was before right-to-buy legislation was even introduced.
Were these properties, then, mis-sold in the 1980s and thereafter? Did the council have a duty to flag up RAAC – along with the devastating consequences which might lie decades down the line? And what of the other councils across Scotland?
Did Aberdeen fail to divulge this key detail too? Former council leader Alex Nicoll suggested at a public meeting last month that the issue had been known about in the city for decades.
Thus far, Dundee's strategy has been to embark on a programme of reinforcing the affected properties – and to bill private residents for their share of the work, even if they have not agreed to it.
That has resulted in demands for up to £7,000, but many have claimed paying up would be throwing good money after bad.
Even after the repairs, the properties would still contain RAAC and would therefore remain practically unsellable.
A Dundee City Council spokesman said: 'Defects can happen in properties of all construction types and there was no prior equivalent industry-wide concern about RAAC until the issues came to light in schools in England from 2019 onwards.
'Where communal works are undertaken to mixed tenure blocks the council re-charges a proportionate share of the costs of these works to private owners.'
In Tillicoultry, meanwhile, 27 properties – ten privately owned – were declared uninhabitable and shuttered up when RAAC was identified in 2023. Some owners were given hours to clear out.
One, Frances Reid, recalled: 'I got a phone call on my way home from work one day, saying: 'Can you get back now to evacuate your property?' When I got there it was chaos.'
Auxiliary nurse Lynsey McQuater was another owner suddenly declared homeless.
After moving in with her mother, she said: 'I was absolutely distraught, in floods of tears when it happened. I thought I had a home, I had security, I had a plan for my future. That was all ripped away.'
Last week, the council said it would buy back any properties that private owners wished to dispose of, but at a price reflecting the cost of repairs.
Who should pay, then, for this monumental shambles? It is a question Liam Kerr has asked recently-appointed housing minister Mairi McAllan repeatedly.
Indeed, he says, he has already identified an unspent £20million housing pot first allocated to Aberdeen in 2016 which must be used within the next year. The problem? No one seems to know the criteria by which the money could be released.
He suggests the minister had 'ignored this solution entirely'. He tells the Mail: 'The Scottish Government has devolved responsibility for setting RAAC right, which, all-too-predictably, the SNP are paddling frantically to get away from.'
He adds: 'I believe there will be a documentary expose of this, some day soon, about how lives have been destroyed in communities across Scotland, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, while ministers just looked on.'
While the Scottish Government has argued that Westminster must roll out a UK-wide RAAC relief fund, both the previous
Conservative administration and the current Labour one have reminded its ministers that housing is devolved.
So the buck passing goes on.
'Something is going to happen, there's going to be that straw that breaks the back,' warns Paula Fraser, who was rehomed from her Aberdeen property as a result of RAAC.
There are ominous signs that it will be a tragedy.