David Knight: Torry Raac residents need concrete guarantees they will see meaningful compensation

Press and Journal

04-05-2025

Banging our heads against a brick wall is never a pastime which holds much hope of delivering satisfaction.
But with a combination of dogged determination and unshakeable belief in justice on our side, eventual triumph is a possibility.
We only have to look at the struggles of wrongly-jailed postmasters, the tainted blood scandal and the damaged babies in Corby, where many families of Scottish descent were trapped in a catastrophic chemical reclamation disaster.
A new scandal is engulfing the 'Raac families' in Aberdeen with homes rendered inhabitable by a covering of dodgy sub-standard concrete.
Will this prove to be on a similar scale to previous examples of bewildering actions by public officials causing outrage?
Residents are also banging their heads against walls, but in this case real ones affected by a kind of concrete cancer.
The 'newly-crowned' Lord Gove of Torry nailed his colours to the mast of the Aberdeen cause.
Lord Gove, who grew up in Aberdeen before becoming a Cabinet minister, told the P&J that the finger-pointing of blame had to stop and a solution found at national and local government levels.
He has strong family roots in Aberdeen and an obvious warmth towards the Granite City; hence his choice of title.
Whether passionate Toryism has attracted reciprocal warmth from the city is debatable.
But tangible support for the P&J Raac campaign might prove to be a turning point in this relationship: even a lasting legacy of respect for defending the interests of the worst-affected families in the Balnagask area of Torry.
These are the private owners in Raac homes, whose property values have eroded far faster than the concrete itself – losing up to £50,000 each.
Balnagask translates in Gaelic to 'village in the hollow'; village in the pit of despair now.
The real test for Gove is how hard he applies himself with effective contributions from a new position of privilege; to talk the walk, as they say.
The Raac families really are on the rack.
The medieval torture rack tore people apart.
Doctors in Torry report that many Raac owners facing financial ruin are turning to drink and anti-depressants to try to cope with their lives being ripped apart.
We all have individual daily struggles on a personal level which help us empathise with those fighting the system on a much bigger scale.
As the Fortunes (old 60s band) sang, 'You've got your troubles, I've got mine.'
Have you ever felt helpless while challenging a powerful yet seemingly incompetent bureaucracy?
Lately, I've been banging my head against a brick wall, too: an imaginary brick wall held together by a plastering of red tape.
But it's the kind of personal anguish which often remains hidden from public view.
My aged relative is one of the poorest pension-credit recipients Starmer and Reeves made such a show of protecting (in public at least) after their outrageous and ill-judged mugging of old people receiving winter energy payments.
Her story begins with a discovery that weekly pension credit payments from the Department for Work and Pensions stopped inexplicably.
She's stuck at the bottom of the pile: gripped by dementia in a care home and suffering at least two other of the biggest diseases we fear most.
Yet she's still forced to cough up £5000 a month for care fees after being forced to sell her house; that pot is vanishing as fast as a brick thrown into a fast river.
So her pension-credit support is a big deal; by the time we found out she was already £500 out of pocket.
Endless phone calls to DWP.
It seemed the 'system' didn't like a miniscule private pension she received from her late husband, which was about to increase by one pound to the grand total of £48 a month – yes, a month.
The potential headlines ran through my head: 'Sick woman, 92, has pension credit axed by DWP for sake of 25p a week – so much for welfare state.'
This explanation was soon jettisoned for something far more familiar to us all – the ubiquitous 'IT glitch'.
Equanimity was restored by DWP, but only after 10 days of exasperating phone calls and helpless dread.
Call handlers were friendly, but the system so cold.
They never wrote to flag up the problem, so I doubt if there will ever be a proper explanation.
We were stressed out for almost two weeks, so how much worse are the Raac families feeling with no sign of relief in sight?
Natural justice points to some form of realistic compensation instead of what they have been offered so far.
But how long could that take? Aberdeen City Council is in such a dire state that it makes you wonder where they would find the money.
I'm not being flippant, but residents need something more concrete than that.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal