How did they not see this coming? Normally that question is one of the laziest you can ask in Westminster: easy for pundits or opposition politicians to say with a confident flourish in hindsight when they hadn’t seen it coming beforehand, either. But in the case of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), everyone saw this coming.
The reason the school concrete crisis is so potent is that ministers have known for years about the presence of RAAC in public buildings (decades, in fact: it was in the late 1990s that concerns started to emerge about problems with this material). Yet the announcement that schools would have to close buildings last week still came as a shock because no one had prepared the ground for it.
So far, the government has struggled to find a convincing narrative on this
Today, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is giving a statement to the Commons about the school building closures.
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