Scotland’s RAAC Pledge Left Homeowners Between Two Governments

Fourteen months after Scotland’s housing secretary promised to raise RAAC homeowners’ case, demolition has started in Aberdeen and the national fund they asked for still does not exist.

In August 2025 Màiri McAllan told the UK RAAC Campaign Group she would take their proposals to both governments. She met residents, stood up a leadership group, and then left the housing brief. Holyrood later shut the campaign’s petition, and Edinburgh and London kept the same line: the other capital should pay.

McAllan Answered, Then the Housing Post Vanished

McAllan’s first detailed reply to the campaign is dated 11 August 2025, two months after she became cabinet secretary for housing. Wilson Chowdhry, chair of the UK RAAC Campaign Group, had asked for interest-free help on stranded mortgages, tighter homebuyer surveys, a compensation fund, and a public inquiry.

She refused a Scottish inquiry. “We will instead focus on finding practical solutions to the immediate challenges in hand,” she wrote. She said a UK inquiry was for the UK government. She did promise to meet owners in the busiest private clusters and to put the group’s legal asks in front of both administrations.

Chowdhry welcomed the letter. “We welcome the Cabinet Secretary’s commitment to raise our proposals at both UK and Scottish levels,” he said. He still wanted First Minister John Swinney in the room.

RAAC meetings logged in an FOI release run from 18 June 2025 to 28 January 2026. They include Dundee City Council, a public panel in Dundee on 27 August 2025, Aberdeen’s co-leaders and residents on 22 October, Clackmannanshire residents on 19 November, West Lothian residents on 3 December, and two sittings of the RAAC in Housing Leadership Group, on 4 September 2025 and 28 January 2026. Large parts of the notes were withheld as policy in formation.

THE YEAR AFTER THE LETTER

1. 11 August 2025: McAllan writes to Chowdhry, rules out a Scottish public inquiry, and offers resident meetings.
2. 4 September 2025: The RAAC in Housing Leadership Group meets for the first time.
3. 2 October 2025: Scottish ministers invite Aberdeen to bid for £10 million through the Affordable Housing Supply Programme.
4. 19 November 2025: McAllan meets Tillicoultry residents after two years of empty flats.
5. 20 January 2026: The Institution of Structural Engineers publishes Scottish housing roof guidance.
6. 19 February 2026: Campaigners meet Scottish Government officials at Atlantic Quay in Glasgow.
7. 25 February 2026: MSPs close petition PE2113.
8. 20 May 2026: The standalone housing secretary post is abolished after the Scottish Parliament election.
9. 18 August 2026: Demolition of RAAC homes in Balnagask moves into its structural phase.

On 20 May 2026 John Swinney folded housing into Shirley-Anne Somerville’s social justice brief and sent McAllan to education, culture and Gaelic. The Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland’s national director, Gillian McLees, called the merger “deeply disappointing.” The RAAC file did not get a dedicated cabinet post on the other side of that change.

Aberdeen Buys Homes While Dundee Props Roofs

The practical split is now visible on the ground. Aberdeen is knocking down. Dundee is trying to leave the RAAC in place and carry the load on a new roof underneath. Private owners in both cities still sit outside the social-housing count.

Aberdeen City Council found RAAC in 366 council homes and 138 private addresses in Balnagask, Torry, in 2023. Tenants were moved. Private owners were offered voluntary buyouts. Early offers were fought over; one owner, John Meiklejohn, said a house bought for £120,000 was being valued around £60,000. In late October 2025 the council agreed in principle to add £44,000 for a four-bedroom home, £37,000 for a three-bedroom, and £20,000 for a one-bedroom, on top of market value and legal fees.

By 19 August 2026, councillors were told 128 of those 138 private owners had agreed to sell and 112 purchases had completed. Demolition of an initial block was under way, with a wider sweep planned after that. A July building warrant put £5.8 million on knocking down 277 homes across 12 streets, including Balnagask Road, Girdleness Road and Rockall Place. The rebuild has been put at more than £150 million, with a masterplan due in summer 2027 and clearance scheduled through 2028.

Dundee is on another track. The Scottish Housing Regulator’s July 2025 return gives Dundee City Council 516 social homes with RAAC, the largest social stock on the list. Council leader Mark Flynn said in February 2026 that a new roof structure built directly below the existing RAAC was the preferred fix, matching advice given to the Leadership Group. Pilot work on five empty homes of different types had been approved about a year earlier. Private owners were told the repair is theirs and that they should get their own engineer.

That is the method set out in the Institution of Structural Engineers’ Scottish residential RAAC roof guidance, issued on 20 January 2026. Part 1, 24 pages, is for engineers and chartered surveyors doing the first appraisal of roof panels. Part 2 is the detailed assessment. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors followed in February 2026 with a practice alert telling members to use it.

Aberdeen homeowner David Porter has said he replaced his own roof for about £20,000 and that the job took two weeks. His point was blunt: a private repair can be cheaper than flattening a whole estate. The council has not adopted that as policy for Balnagask.

THREE COUNCILS, THREE TRACKS

Lynn Winstanley, a Balnagask owner in the Torry Community RAAC Campaign, treated the October 2025 money news with care. “The way it’s worded makes it look like it will directly help us as homeowners, but we don’t want to get our hopes up, it’s been a long year,” she said.

How Many Scottish Homes Still Have RAAC?

Social landlords finished their checks. Private owners never had a single public register of the same kind, which is why campaign counts and council lists still do not match.

On 4 July 2025 the Scottish Housing Regulator reported 2,205 social rented homes with RAAC across 17 landlords, about 0.4% of social homes in Scotland. Nicola Harcus, an assistant director at the regulator, said it would keep pressing those landlords for assurance on their plans. The previous public total had been higher; some landlords later removed homes they did not own or that were not dwellings.

SOCIAL STOCK, JULY 2025

• National total: 2,205 social rented homes, 17 landlords, about 0.4% of social stock.
• Largest councils: Dundee 516, Aberdeen 366, South Lanarkshire 157, North Lanarkshire 103, West Lothian 81, Clackmannanshire 69.
• Largest housing associations: Almond 328, Bridgewater 142, Viewpoint 130, Sanctuary Scotland 102.
• Private gap: Aberdeen’s 138 private addresses sit outside that 2,205 figure, as do other owner-occupied roofs.

Almond’s 328 homes help explain the 3 December 2025 West Lothian visit. Kerry MacIntosh, a Livingston campaigner, later told officials she believed there had been prior knowledge of RAAC in stock linked to Almond Housing Association and West Lothian Council. At the 19 February 2026 Atlantic Quay meeting, deputy director for Better Homes, Mr Elsby, said the papers had been reviewed and that no further action would be taken at that stage. Chowdhry asked who had reviewed them, and whether a Police Scotland referral had even been considered.

Schools and hospitals ran on a different clock. One parliamentary account put identified schools at 40, later 29, with some replacements sitting inside the £2 billion learning estate programme. In Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire Council’s Ravenswood Primary finished a £2.5 million RAAC panel replacement in September 2026. Private roofs do not have an equivalent capital line.

The £10 Million Was Never RAAC Money

The October 2025 Aberdeen deal is the nearest thing Scotland has to a national answer, and it is not one. McAllan said a bid against the 2016 Housing Infrastructure Fund did not meet the rules, so she invited the council to seek the same sum through the Affordable Housing Supply Programme. That, she said, would free cash inside the council’s own budget.

This will make a valuable contribution towards Scotland’s supply of affordable housing while creating the headroom for the council to meet the cost of remediation from within its own budget, as is the correct approach.

Màiri McAllan, then Cabinet Secretary for Housing, 2 October 2025

Aberdeen City Council later made the accounting explicit. “The £10m is not for RAAC-related works; it is to support the Affordable Housing Supply Programme,” a spokesperson said, in a June 2026 reply that also recorded only 42 completed private acquisitions as at February 2026, before the later summer wave of buyouts.

WHAT THE £10 MILLION IS AND IS NOT

• The label: Grant support invited through the Affordable Housing Supply Programme, not a RAAC compensation scheme.
• The local use: Aberdeen said the extra headroom let it offer top-up payments on voluntary sales.
• The national tool: A December 2025 finance circular allowed councils, for 2025-26 only, to swap general capital grant into the capital fund so revenue reserves could be spent on RAAC repairs.
• The limit: Dundee campaigners asked for the same treatment and were told Aberdeen’s deal honoured a 2016 commitment and “specific circumstances.”

That 2025-26 capital grant flexibility for RAAC is a bookkeeping door, not a cheque to owners. It lasted one financial year and needed a ministerial letter for each sum. Clackmannanshire lodged its own Affordable Housing Supply Programme request on 23 January 2026. At Atlantic Quay, officials said it would be sped up. No award has been published in the same terms as Aberdeen’s.

Westminster Still Calls It a Devolved Problem

The campaign’s money asks were always going to hit the devolution join. Mortgage rules, insurance law and much of consumer credit sit at Westminster. Housing, building standards and most grant powers sit in Edinburgh. Each side uses that map to point at the other.

McAllan’s 30 October 2025 submission to Holyrood’s petitions committee said she had written to the UK government several times for a national RAAC fund, including on 2 October 2025 to Steve Reed, then secretary of state for housing, communities and local government. She argued many of the homes were sold under Right to Buy, which predates devolution, and that insurance, tax and consumer protection are reserved. A June letter to the then deputy prime minister, she said, had drawn a reply with “no plans to set up any RAAC scheme or fund to address RAAC in residential settings.”

A 29 May 2025 letter to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, made the same ask against the UK budget and noted that health and education RAAC had been recognised with repair money, while housing had not. UK ministers have pointed the other way. Alex Norris, then the UK building-safety minister, treated the file as devolved. Scottish ministers have also confirmed they hold discretionary grant powers under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988, subject to cash.

On X the argument keeps snapping back to 1999. Every RAAC home in this stock was built before Holyrood existed, so London, in that telling, still owns the bill. That history is real, and so is the fact that housing policy has been made in Edinburgh for a generation. The result for owners is a stalled mortgage market and a repair they cannot price, while each government waits on the other.

At Atlantic Quay on 19 February 2026, officials told Chowdhry there had been no change in the UK position on a national fund, and that the Scottish Government still held Westminster responsible. They also described work with the Institution of Structural Engineers and the Association of British Insurers so that repaired homes could be treated as sound. They gave no date for when lenders and insurers would treat “green” and “amber” roofs as normal again.

Holyrood Closed the Campaign’s Petition

The parliamentary track ended in the same week as that Glasgow meeting. Wilson and Hannah Chowdhry’s petition PE2113, published on 23 July 2024, asked MSPs to push ministers for a national fund, a public inquiry into how councils and housing associations handled RAAC, and product-style duties on those who built and sold the homes. It drew 2,553 signatures. On 25 February 2026 the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee closed the petition on 25 February under Rule 15.7.

A UK Parliament petition on the same themes had already missed the 10,000-signature mark for a government response. Alloa and Grangemouth MP Brian Leishman later carried a version of the campaign’s ask into Westminster. None of that produced a fund.

Inquiry remains off the table. McAllan’s August 2025 letter said Scotland had no plans to launch one. Officials repeated that on 19 February 2026, even after Chowdhry’s dossier on missed warnings, patchy oversight, and councils losing track of RAAC stock. MacIntosh’s request for a meeting with Swinney was not acknowledged in the room. Chowdhry asked afterwards whether it had been considered at all.

He summed up the Glasgow session in March 2026. The meeting, he said, let the group put its case clearly. On a national fund and a public inquiry, there had been no policy shift.

Tillicoultry Waited Two Years for a Visit

Clackmannanshire is the test of whether meetings change outcomes. Three blocks on Chapelle Crescent, High Street and Park Street in Tillicoultry were emptied from September and October 2023. About 30 homes sat vacant. Lynsey McQuater, chair of the Tillicoultry RAAC Campaign Group, wrote that Aberdeen and Dundee had already had ministers while her streets had none. McAllan’s 19 November 2025 visit came after Keith Brown, MSP for Clackmannanshire and Dunblane, pressed for a date.

Brown called RAAC a UK-wide problem and said Westminster had “refused to contribute a penny towards remediation.” “Only the UK Government has the financial capacity to deal with legacy issues of this scale,” he said. Leishman, writing on 2 October 2026, went the other way. Housing, he said, is devolved, the wait for a cabinet secretary was two years, and “at all levels the SNP utterly abandoned these people.”

Those two sentences are the trap. One MP says only London can pay. The other says only Edinburgh must. Private owners in Tillicoultry, Dundee and the leftover Aberdeen sales are living inside that argument, not above it.

In Aberdeen the diggers are already in. In Dundee the preferred engineering answer is a second roof. In Clackmannanshire the Affordable Housing Supply Programme bid is still the live ask. The letter from August 2025 did produce meetings, guidance and one city’s demolition programme. It did not produce a national fund, an inquiry, or a housing secretary whose only job was housing.