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 Ford Award this year?

The story that's brought me to the Paul Foot Awards is our coverage of the RACC concrete crisis in Aberdeen and our campaign called Trapped by RAC.

So, can you remind anyone who may have taken their eye off the story or not heard about rack in the first place.

What is rack?

Rack is, it basically means reinforced, autoclaved, aerated concrete.

The irony is it's not really concrete at all because of all these things, but it means it's

like a bubbly, porous form of concrete.

It looks like the inside of a narrow bar if you were to break it in half.

And in a lot of buildings that were made post-war,

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 discovered that there were 500 homes

that were made with RAC. 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 tell us about those?

Yeah. I mean, we refer to it as risky rack, crumbling concrete.

In a nutshell, in about October, 2023, it was revealed that, you know,

rack 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.

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