New Keltbray business offers to test for RAAC

Keltbray has contacted the government about helping out test for RAAC in schools and hospitals as part of a new business it has launched.

The firm’s 80-strong design consultancy Wentworth House Partnership, which has been going for around 20 years, has set up a new service which tests the integrity of materials in existing steel and concrete structures before they are re-used in schemes.

Keltbray said Wentworth House Technical Services will provide testing and analysis of materials to help developers and contractors make up their minds about whether materials can be re-used in the event of information loss over a building’s history.

The move has been in the pipeline for several months but a Keltbray spokesperson said it has recently written to government as well as the Construction Leadership Council about testing for crumbling concrete in the wake of the RAAC crisis which blew up days before the start of the new school year.

As well as surveys and investigations, the firm will also be able to carry out materials sampling and structural testing, design support and monitoring of structures.

Tim Lohmann, Keltbray’s director of strategic engineering, said: “Our recent experience has revealed a fundamental shift in clients’ treatment of building assets at the traditional ‘end of life’ phase, with an increasing swing towards re-modelling and re-purposing of existing structures, away from the old de-facto model of ‘demolish and rebuild’.”

Yesterday, officials from the Department for Education (DfE) told the Public Accounts Committee that initial surveys of the problem concrete, which it had been carrying out since September 2022, were “primarily visual”.

The DfE’s permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood said that intrusive surveys, which may have involved closing off sections of schools for periods, would have “massively extended the length of time it would have taken to identify RAAC across the whole school estate”.