Amid a mounting political and educational crisis over schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) from the 1950s to 1990s, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, said it was still not known how many might be affected, and how many might need to close, with engineers still to inspect more sites.
Heh. Well, even if one takes a really hard-cynical position like that, it’d probably be preferable to have it fixed than ignored. I’m saying that the UK isn’t unique in using it, but is unusual in the attention being paid to it.
My understanding is that the reduced 30 year lifetime was something determined in the 1990s after the material had already been used in construction for some decades, that the short estimate was based on the rate of degradation observed. That is, the basic problem wasn’t people intentionally choosing a material that they knew to have a short lifetime, but in a new, experimental material having some serious issues that weren’t originally recognized when it started being used.