Achieving a resolution for homeowners

Hello there, Tom Allen here from the Pottering Podcast. This episode is brought to you by MyGarden Escape at QVC. I don't know about you, but the moment the sun started peeking through the clouds, my mind immediately wandered to the garden and getting its summer ready. And if you're the same, then my garden escape at QVC is a perfect place to start. It's a bit like having your own virtual gardening centre where you can browse a whole range of plants, garden decor, tools, planters, outdoor lighting, and more, all from the comfort of your own home. You'll find inspiration and expert gardening advice all at your fingertips, whether online, on socials or on QVC's streaming platform QVC Plus. And if you're planning a bit of alfresco dining, take a look at their gorgeous outdoor furniture ranges, from 70s-inspired retro looks with avocado greens and bold stripes, to modern neutrals with rattan accents. Whether you're creating a space to host friends and family or in need of a relaxing retreat, MyGardenEscape at QVC is your ultimate gardening destination. Search MyGardenEscape at QVCuk.com to discover more and use code POTTER for ten pounds off your first purchase with QVC over £30 . For full terms, visit the QVC website. Hi, it's Zoe and Joe from Digit, and this week we're sponsored by Sainsbury's Taste the Difference. Now I've been thinking a lot about this recently. The meals that actually feel the most summery are the ones that really need the least effort, which is great. Exactly. It's more about what you're using rather than how long you spend on it. My kind of meal, and this is where Sainsbury's taste of difference really comes in. Like the Jersey Royal New Potatoes, nutty, creamy, and grown on the island of Jersey. A bit of butter and some herbs, and you are done . Then for something lighter, the Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Italian burrata is crafted in Italy to an authentic recipe. That gorgeous mix of cream and mozzarella encased in a delicate shell. Delicious with some olive oil and bread. It feels completely restaurant worthy and you've barely done anything. And to finish, the Sainsbury's taste the different strawberries are hand selected to be perfectly ripe, sweet , and juicy. The perfect summer spread. One ingredient from the taste the difference range can instantly lift the whole meal. With Sainsbury's Taste the Difference, you can always taste the difference. Available in selected stores and online. Welcome back to page 94. This is the Paul Foot Award shortlist mini-series. Let's find out who is the third of the journalists shortlisted for an award this year. Page 94. The Private Eye Podcast. My name is Lindsay Bruce and I'm part of the features team at the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Fantastic. And what's the story that's brought you to the Paul Fit Award this year? The story that's brought me to the Pol ford Awards is our coverage of the RAC concrete crisis in Aberdeen and her and her campaign called Trapped by Rack. So can you remind anyone who may have uh taken their eye off the story or not heard about rack in the first place. What is rack? Rack is it's uh it basically means reinforced, autoclaved, aerated concrete. Uh the irony is it's not really concrete at all because of all these things, but it means it's like a bubbly , porous uh form of concrete. It looks like the inside of an aerobar if you were to break it in half. And in a lot of buildings that were made post-war, um new towns, for example, huge council house in estates, rack was used in the roof panels and it was also used in some walls. But in Aberdeen, certainly we we discovered that there were 500 homes that were that were made with rack. The rack was in the roof panels as well as some public buildings as well. And there are problems with rack, I believe, to put it mildly. Can you can you tell us about those? Uh yeah. I mean we we refer to it as risky rack, uh crumbling concrete. In a in a nutshell in about October twenty twenty three uh it was revealed that you know RAC was in a lot of public buildings. This is years after they had had alerts and warnings about school roofs coming down because they were made with rack. The the problem with rack is um it it is porous and so it can absorb a lot of water over the years. So any building in the United Kingdom, but particularly places like Wales, the cent ral belt and the north of Scotland, there's going to be a lot of water in the buildings and so when it was discovered that there was five hundred homes in Aberdeen with rack in the roofs, the immediate um issue was are these roofs about to collapse on the people that are living in them as they had done in uh some schools previously? So that was the situation we had. Um it was uh uh November 2023 when, the the homeowners and council tenants were told there may be rack in your homes, and it wasn't until the following February, February 202 4, that they actually found out yes, you have got rack in your homes and then from there on in calamity, catastrophe and drama for all these people uh that were that were living in homes with uh roofs that could collapse at any moment. Extremely nerve-wracking to be told that to say the least. Um, how did you start reporting the story? So the newspaper started reporting it back then, October 2023. My involvement came, I'm part of the features team, and so my involvement came um in about August twenty twenty four and what happened there was I um I attended a church service in Torrey, the area uh that is most affected by Rack in our patch and in a room of about fifty people. Th wereere three women who were all about to be displaced to elsewhere in the city because their council house had rack in it. And there were two families who were facing bankruptcy because their house had rack in it. Now this is when my my part of the journey started. I pitched the idea that perhaps I could go and set up camp in Balnagasque maybe over two days, work from a community centre, let people know I was going to be there and see if we could tell one or two stories . Well, the reality is that um from the second I set my computer up I had a queue of people next to my desk and so it ended up being like a a clinic if you like, the way a a a politician would come and and sit down and wait for people to come and talk. So for two days I had people person after person coming in telling me what was going on and and saying you should go and see Diane and Sandy down there. They're going to lose their house and um and so I just heard all these stories and overnight while I was there the news went from there's rack in your home to we've voted to demolish your homes. Who's saying that? I'm sorry. The council . So in between times the council met and they voted that the best option to deal with RAC was not to fix it, was not um you know, to remediate it, was to demolish these houses. When the council decided that the best way to deal with the rack was to demolish in in essence the whole of Balnagasque, which is one housing estate, the council tenants were just moved, just moved, the huge trauma had been moved. The homeowners then were left with two options. You can fix the rack in your house, and that's between twenty and roughly forty five thousand pounds per home to fix the rack because it means replacing the whole roof, not just the tiles, not just the structure, the whole thing. And so in a flat that would be about twenty thousand pounds in a a four bedroom or a three bedroom house would be like forty thousand pounds. And these are this is a house in estate that's probably one of the the least expensive places to live in the whole city. So if on average a house maybe is like £120,000 for one of the larger ones, so then the council was saying we're going to buy back your house at market value, but market value taken into consideration , you've got rack in your house that they didn't know about when they bought their houses. And so that would mean if you paid £120,000 for your house, you were going to lose at least the cost of rack. I can think of a family, they spent £123,000 on their house. They were given a value of sixty-eight thousand pounds for their house. They still owed £100,000 on their mortgage. And so if they agreed to sell, they would have been a negative equity it's so they had to pay back a mortgage on a house they're no longer living in that's been demolished and then find somewhere else to rent for them and their two kids. And that was the reality and and that reality was causing stress to the point of suicidal ide ation for people. It was causing um numerous health issues. And so these people were faced with the thought of actually are we going to be homeless? Are we are we are we going to lose everything we've ever worked for? And this was overnight. And so I caught that reaction in the community centre that day. And then from then we just kept covering the crisis. We just kept um reporting every new council meeting, every update I would find these stories to tell. And there was just a point in early April last year, 2025, where I went to my editor and said, Look, it's not enough. We're going to need to tip this into a campaign if possible. And you know, there's usually that thing in newspapers well, is it winnable? What would winning have looked like So winning would have been some kind of resolution for some of the people in this. It's hard to describe to you. There's so many layers of nuance in this, but all the way along, every meeting I had, every interview I conducted, there was no sense to me that the homeowners in particular were being treated with compassion and or were being treated fairly. And even when I would speak to council officials, I would see that they had a huge task on their hands. There was no denying that. I think the council leader described it as the biggest movement of people in peacetime Aberdeen had seen. And I would agree with that. It was enormous to try and rehome five five hundred families. But for for me, nobody would answer my question, but what is going to happen to these people? The ones that are going to lose their home, lose half the value of their home and still have to pay their mortgage, how are they going to pay rent if they're still paying their mortgage on a property that's going to be demolished? What are these people going to do that are in mental health crisis because of the stress of living in a home where your roof could come down on you, but you can't sell because if you sell to the council, you're going to lose half the value of your home. So what we asked for was that this conversation would be raised at government to all levels. Being in Scotland, housing is devolved. But a lot of these people bought their homes under a right to buy, so they bought from the council. So we wanted this to be a conversation at all levels because RAC is affecting disproportionately people in Scotland more than any other part of the United Kingdom. But there are other pockets in the United Kingdom. So we wanted it raised at Westminster as well as Holyrood. Um we wanted a fair resolution for homeowners. I we we did not want a single person in Aberdeen to be homeless through no fault of their own And we wanted uh the the conversation to keep going, which is what we're trying to keep doing now, so that there will be a public inquiry and a decision made on whether RAC needs to be listed as a dangerous material or or something moving forward so that we don't see swathes of people like there's 900 households in Dundee just now, also uh with RAC, what is going to happen to them? Um and so that that that a win for us was something around all of them. I don't think that we ever thought we were going to get fair house prices, but I was determined that if there was something I could do I was going to do it and that's what we did. You said you went into campaigning mode. Can you describe a couple of the campaigning tactics you used to get the message across of this story? So we um we had downloadable or um pull out posters in our print publications, trapped by rack that went up all over the city. So hundred s of homes and businesses had these up in their windows. They had a QR code on them that you could sign a petition, you could read more about the articles, you could get behind the campaign. With a couple of hours notice we discovered that one of our RAC families was going to the Scottish Cup final and so we had a banner printed and they held it pitch side right behind where all the players were doing their um announcements and so they they said, you know, help the Aberdeen families trap by Iraq. That that was particularly humorous to me because I knew the council leader supported Aberdeen, so he'd be watching it. We did street protests. Uh I w I went along to every uh uh not every to start with there was closed meetings in a in a local pub just for the homeowners that they'd formed a committee to decide what they were going to do. But as I gained trust over the months they invited me to come along to these as well. And so a lot of Sunday nights were spent in the White Cockade pub in Tory discussing what we were going to do, how we could elevate voices. For me, it meant door knocking, walking round hundreds of doors. I think at the last count, I think I've interviewed about ninety people or ninety representatives from these households that um were involved with rack um in some in some shape or form. I believe you hosted your own question time event, is that right? We did, yeah. So we used our press room here, we set up a c a question time event, we had our editor chair that some uh MSPs were there, uh the local the council leader was there. Uh we also had a doctor from Tory who who came along and he was fantastic. He gave us an exclusive where he talked to us about the health ramifications of this crisis. And so we had all these people in the room. It was explosive. You know, the the homeowners were toe-to-toe with their elected officials and were able to speak to them, call them to account. It all sounds um, and I'm saying this word in the absolute most positive sense, very tabloid, where you are drawing attention to a a huge problem, a crisis, something that's really affected people's lives , but you are doing so um in a way that is vibrant and engaging and gets people on board. I you know, concrete is not a sexy subject to talk about and um and and the people in Tory will know if they hear this what I mean by this, people in an area that is often m uh, you know, mischaracterized um and, you know, looked down upon. There's a lot of snobbery in this. Uh you know, comments like th why would you even want to live there anyway? There was no sense of the injustice and the the trauma that these people were going through. And so for me it was how can I tell story after story after story in a way that people will will see themselves in it. And so it was and and honestly that was easy when I spoke to these people. There was eighty odd year old Charlie Walker, an army veteran, who was crying in his chair next to the empty chair because his wife had just died, wondering if he's going to be homel ess. You know, that I don't need to write that in any dramatic way for that to be absolutely harrowing. And it was story after story. The very first couple that I interviewed were George and Sheila MacDonald, and George and Sheila told the story of when they went to the council meeting and they were they were talking about whether they would demolish their houses. Politicians were scrolling on their phones, and I saw this, I was in the press gallery, scrolling on their phones and you know doing online shopping as they were making the decision whether 1 38 homeowners were going to lose everything. And they were so traumatized by this, Sheila told me that you know the str ess of this situation she she just wishes she hadn't retired. Two weeks after this I was walking my dog in Tory, I made a point of going through Tory at least once a week so that I could watch the decline and you know what was happening and then go back to the council and hold them to account again. And I was walking my dog through Tory when my phone rang and it was George to tell me Sheila had died. Two weeks after we put her on a poster, two weeks after that very first interview. And he was much more gracious than I was, but for me , I I worried that that was going to be the first of many. Um people who were just under such um protracted, never-ending stress that this crisis was going to