"Eye-watering" sums of money are being spent on mitigating the risks of aerated concrete in hospitals, the chair of the public accounts committee says
Meg Hillier, a Labour MP, says hospitals are working around the problem of RAAC rather than resolving it
Labour is calling for an urgent audit of the concrete in public buildings, with some hospitals and courts known to contain the material
And the Lib Dems have called for PM Rishi Sunak to hold an emergency meeting, known as Cobra
More than 100 schools are scrambling to make arrangements after being told to shut buildings that have RAAC and do not have safety measures in place
Parents at schools known to have RAAC should already have been informed, the government has said, but it has not yet published a list of affected schools
Schools across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also being checked
Alex Therrien
Live reporter
We're now closing our live coverage. Thanks for joining us.
The writers were Emily Atkinson and Thomas Mackintosh and the page was edited by me.
Want to know why RAAC is a safety risk? Read our explainer here. You can look at our list of schools affected by closures here. And we've answered a bunch of your questions here.
We'll soon be bringing our live coverage to a close for today. But before we do, here's a look back at the main developments from today:
Opposition parties are calling on the government to investigate how widespread the light-weight concrete RAAC is in schools, hospitals, courts and other public buildings and to assess the risk this poses.
Labour has said there should be an "urgent audit", while the Lib Dems have urged Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to convene an emergency Cobra meeting to find a way to fix England's "crumbling" schools and hospitals.
Earlier, the chair of the public accounts committee, Labour MP Meg Hillier, said "eye-watering" sums of money were being spent on mitigating the risks of RAAC in hospitals.
Concrete expert Prof Chris Goodier said the only way to tackle the RAAC issue was to survey buildings individually.
While most of our focus was on England today, the urgent action has triggered a search for RAAC in buildings in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Harrow Crown Court is closed indefinitely due to the discovery of RAAC
As we’ve been reporting, it’s not only schools that were built using reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, known as RAAC.
RAAC is thought to be present in 26 hospitals in England. The government has said seven of the worst affected - West Suffolk Hospital, James Paget Hospital, Airedale Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Leighton Hospital and Frimley Park Hospital - have all been prioritised for urgent rebuilding work.
Last week, Harrow Crown Court in London was closed indefinitely after RAAC was discovered. Five other court buildings are affected, according to government sources.
Meanwhile, three buildings in the Department of Work and Pensions have also been identified as raising concerns.
Since 2018, those responsible for public buildings have been encouraged to conduct surveys to identify the material and have it removed if found.
Schools that have had to close classrooms and buildings are now scrambling to make alternative arrangements for the start of the new year next week.
Among them, the Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls in Ealing, West London, a secondary school, has asked students to bring in packed lunches because its canteen is out of action, while science lessons cannot take place in laboratories.
Writing to parents the school adds: "We have taken the decision to vacate the science block, the old gym, the hall and canteen.
"The school is open for all students but as a preventative measure we will be taking these areas out of use while we put safety measures in place - we will always prioritise the safety of students and our staff."
Tom Symonds
Home affairs correspondent
Warren Thomas, a structural engineer in Welwyn Garden City, has been showing me how a chunk of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) can simply be snapped in his fingers.
RAAC is light and easy to mould into panels for floors and ceilings. A grid of steel bars is set into the panels to stop them bending or snapping.
But, he says, the tiny holes in the material allow water in, which corrodes the steel. This can be hard to spot because the material does not display obvious cracks, unlike normal concrete.
Add to that the challenge that the RAAC panels are often covered with wood or plaster.
Warren believes this material can be safe, but needs to be maintained and inspected. This task is now a growing part of his business.
But despite the collapse of part of a school in 2018, it is only in the last year that the requests have started to come in. As a result, he says, “we’re playing catch-up.”
On Friday, Schools Minister Nick Gibb told the Today programme the government had spent £15bn in capital funding since 2015 on maintaining and improving the school estate.
That is not the full extent of government spending on refurbishing and rebuilding schools.
The £15bn - or about £1.7bn a year - is the school capital funding, external, which covers “maintaining and improving the condition of school buildings and grounds”.
On top of that, the department has been spending about £0.6bn a year on rebuilding schools. This is set to increase over the next few years as the Schools Rebuilding Program gets under way.
However, all this is significantly less than the amount the Department for Education itself says it needs to bring school buildings up to scratch.
The department said in 2020 it would need £4bn a year for repairing, maintaining and rebuilding schools over the next five years.
And that figure is at the low end of what the Office for Government Property say is required. It estimates that the figure needed is somewhere between £4bn and £8bn.
As we've been reporting, the concrete in some public buildings - including schools, hospitals and courts - has been found to contain RAAC, a form of lightweight, aerated concrete.
The graphic below shows where RAAC is most commonly found - mainly on flat roofs.
Image source, .For more on RAAC, read our simple explainer:
Image source, Getty ImagesSome fresh political reaction to bring you now from the Liberal Democrats, who this afternoon have urged Rishi Sunak to convene an emergency meeting, known as Cobra.
“The government knew this was happening and had no plan to immediately fix the crumbling hospitals, sort the disrepair in schools and make people safe in their own homes," the Lib Dem's Sarah Olney says.
“Call a Cobra now, take responsibility, get temporary solutions for every school - parents need to know that there is urgent action to put this right.”
The government says it has been aware of RAAC in public sector buildings, including schools, since 1994.
It says it has been advising schools to have "adequate contingencies" in place since 2018, in case affected buildings needed to be evacuated.
The ceiling above the staff room at Singlewell Primary School in Gravesend, Kent, collapsed in 2018. IT equipment and an adjoining office were also damaged
Image source, PA MediaBack in May, Parks Primary School in Leicester had to relocate several classes and borrow rooms from other institutions after the discovery of RAAC. The headteacher put the estimated the cost of the disruption so far at £30,000
Image source, PA MediaWork is currently under way at Abbey Lane Primary School, Sheffield, to replace the roof above the school kitchen built using RAAC. Alternative meal arrangements will be in place for students while the work is carried out
A school in Kent has said it will have to serve school dinners in classrooms as it deals with the issue of aerated concrete.
Before the summer, St Bartholomew's Catholic Primary School's hall was identified as containing RAAC.
The school's headteacher told parents in a letter she had hoped the necessary works would be carried out during the holidays.
"Unfortunately, despite the school’s best efforts, this has not been possible," the head teacher wrote.
“RAAC is only isolated to the school hall which continues to be closed.
“The rest of the school is safe and operating as usual. Hot lunches will be prepared in the school kitchen and served in classrooms.”
The short answer is no.
The level of intervention depends on the the impact of RAAC, which varies between buildings.
The government notes, external that some settings may have very little RAAC present, meaning any disruption caused by dealing with the issue would be limited.
Prof Chris Goodier, concrete expert at Loughborough University, told BBC News that schools with RAAC only have to close or partially close if they do not have safety measures in place and cannot make alternative arrangements.
These arrangements may include converting other parts of the school into temporary classrooms or moving children to another site.
Questions remain about the presence of a "crumbly" concrete, known as RAAC, in schools and public sector buildings, including hospitals and courts.
For those of you joining us, here's a quick recap of the key developments this morning:
Image source, PAStaff sitting in a temporary "staff room" in a corridor in a school in Leicester
Some more comments now from Prof Chris Goodier, concrete expert at Loughborough University, who spoke to BBC Breakfast earlier.
Much of the focus so far has been on the presence of RAAC in school buildings, but it is also present in other public buildings, including hospitals and courts.
Goodier said the NHS was at the "forefront" of tackling the issue, having funded research at Loughborough University, where he works.
"The NHS has got a lot of RAAC in many hospitals. They now know where it all is and they know what to do with it and have mitigated that risk."
Schools are "next in line," he adds. "And now other government departments are looking into this for their buildings."
Earlier, Dame Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the public accounts committee, said "wasteful" sums were being spent on hospitals "working around" the problem of RAAC.
Image source, PA MediaAs we have been reporting more than 100 schools have been ordered to close buildings due to the presence of aerated concrete.
The government has not published a list of affected schools, so the BBC is trying to find out through schools themselves.
This morning, a further 12 schools have been confirmed as having to shut buildings due to the presence of RAAC. These schools are in County Durham, Essex, Scarborough, Thurstable, Sidcup, Beddington, Suffolk, Manchester and Hebburn.
We've been sharing detail and reaction this morning over the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in more than 100 schools in England.
But the possible presence of the lightweight concrete is also being assessed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
As it stands, a total of 35 council-run schools in Scotland have been found to contain RAAC.
Scottish Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth said councils were carrying out further assessments, the results of which are expected next week.
The Welsh and Northern Irish governments have also committed to surveying their schools and colleges, though neither have offered a timeline for the assessments.
The only way to identify the scale of the risk of RAAC is for buildings to be looked at and surveyed individually, an expert has said.
Prof Chris Goodier, concrete expert at Loughborough University, tells BBC Breakfast that while there was "no issue with the concept" of using RAAC, there were several factors that increase the likelihood of collapse.
"The perfect storm is that it wasn't manufactured properly, it wasn't installed properly and it wasn't maintained.
"What we need to do is find out where all [the RAAC] is," he says.
But identifying it is not simple since there is no national register that sets out the materials used to construct public sector buildings, Goodier adds.
"Every building from the 60s and 70s that was constructed when it was popular, which is of a building type that might have it in, needs to be looked at."
We've been talking a lot this morning about reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) - a material many of us will never have heard about until a few days ago.
Our graphic below sets out some of the ways the concrete can weaken over time and ultimately fail. The material is now known to have a lifespan of about 30 years.
Image source, .
Image source, UK Parliament"Eye-watering and wasteful" sums of money are being spent on mitigating the risks of RAAC in hospitals, the chairwoman of the public accounts committee has said.
"In both schools and hospitals, there hasn't been enough money going into buildings and equipment," Labour MP Dame Meg Hillier told Times Radio.
She said hospitals were working around the problems they have with RAAC - rather than resolving them - which was costing an "enormous amount".
"We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Image source, PA MediaYesterday afternoon, Lady Diana Barran, an education minister, told the BBC that if parents haven’t been contacted by now then their child's school isn't one of the 156 so far identified as having a problem with its concrete.
The government has not published a list of affected schools.
But we’ve been keeping track of the schools which have told us they are affected by the problem.