The terrifying hidden flaw that could render your home worthless
He was sitting in his car near Aberdeen harbour trying to decide whether to drive it into the sea.
A light touch on the accelerator would solve a lot of problems, he wrote. His wife would receive a life insurance payout.
He would no longer have to face questions from his children, such as 'where are we going to live?' Death would end his feelings of 'complete uselessness'.
Mrs Winstanley was awake when the message came because the anti-depressants and sleeping tablets she has been prescribed don't give her the respite she had hoped for after her own life was thrown into turmoil in 2023.
She called the man immediately and managed to 'talk him down'. He was not her only neighbour experiencing the darkest of thoughts.
Some have turned to drink – others to self-harm. In her part of the city there has been a dramatic spike in depression, anxiety, insomnia and stress-related chest pains.
It is said that, in a doctor's surgery in Torry, Aberdeen, staff now have a code word to identify those patients who must be given urgent appointments. They are the ones whose homes have been earmarked for demolition by the same city council which built them decades ago.
All are said to contain RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) – a cheap form of concrete widely used between the 1950s and 1980s and now known to carry the risk of collapse.
In Aberdeen, the RAAC houses are confined to one area. In Dundee, five residential pockets have been identified. There are more RAAC homes in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, and others in Angus. It's in Edinburgh, West Lothian and North and South Lanarkshire.
Quite how widespread it is in homes built on the cheap by local authorities across Scotland remains to be seen, although it is now estimated there are at least 5,500.
What have already been seen, however, are the devastating consequences of the RAAC issue on those living in affected properties – along with brazen attempts by local and national government to duck responsibility.
But a reckoning is coming, one Dundee campaigner on the issue warned this week.
'This is your next huge court case waiting to happen,' says Yvette Hoskins, 49. 'This is your next Post Office scandal. This is your next cladding scandal.'
Searching questions, she says, are about to be asked on who knew what when – and her own research has already uncovered uncomfortable answers.
At the heart of the scandal is an almighty financial shambles which cash-strapped local authorities cannot afford to put right, even if they are ultimately responsible for causing it.
It was they who commissioned the building of their housing stock – complete with substandard concrete – and they who later sold many of these homes to tenants under 1980s right-to-buy legislation.
Now, decades on, they have carried out audits of RAAC-affected properties they built but are taking no financial responsibility for the ones which have since passed into private ownership.
That is why householders such as the one who nearly drove his car into Aberdeen Harbour are in torment.
There was no mention of RAAC in the home reports when they bought their properties. But now that it has been identified, many are worth considerably less than the mortgages on them.
Aberdeen City Council plans to demolish more than 500 affected homes in the Balnagask area of Torry – including 138 privately-owned ones.
However, the sums it is willing to pay to buy back these properties to then bulldoze are only a fraction of their market value prior to RAAC issue arising.
In recent weeks, SNP co-leader of the council Christian Allard has upped the ante – suggesting structural engineers have told him 'no one should be in these houses another winter'.
North East Conservative MSP Liam Kerr says it leaves householders with a horrific dilemma: 'Stay in your house and the roof might fall in – or accept the lower price and move elsewhere with £40,000 or perhaps £50,000 of outstanding mortgage left over your head.'
It is, he says, 'a scandal which is destroying lives across Scotland'.
Mrs Winstanley, 63, one of the leaders of the Torry RAAC campaign group, is a case in point.
She and husband Andrew bought their one-bedroom flat in Farquhar Brae for £62,000 in 2022, then spent £20,000 on improvements.
Eighteen months later they learned the former council home had been identified as a RAAC property. Currently, she says, the local authority is offering between £20,000 and £30,000 to buy flats similar to hers to knock down.
'I'm now on anti-depressants and sleeping tablets,' she says. 'You just don't sleep, it's constantly going through your head. 'What's going to happen? Where are we going to go? Are we going to end up having to rent somewhere when we're mortgage-free at the moment?'.'
Dozens of other Aberdeen households are asking themselves the same questions. They are families at the lower end of the housing market, some of whom saved for years to put down a deposit on their first homes.
Now the council is urging them to abandon them, and accept a fraction of their previous value in compensation.
Aberdeen has already rehoused hundreds of tenants whose homes in Balnagask were still council-owned, dispersing them in other parts of the city and leaving many struggling to cope with the upheaval.
The more acute problem is the rump of owner occupiers that is now left. They are scattered randomly through the condemned estate, some of them the lone occupants in blocks of flats which were otherwise filled with tenants.
Until they leave, the blocks can't come down and a re-build cannot begin.
As the deadlock drags on, the area is becoming a ghetto as looters and fly-tippers move in. 'It's actually awful now,' says Mrs Winstanley. 'Stuff is getting dumped everywhere and houses getting ransacked.'
In desperation, a few have accepted the money offered by the council, just to escape the misery. One of them
was the motorist considering suicide. Another is a young schoolteacher who had to sell many of her possessions, including her car, to bear the loss of tens of thousands and start again.
'She's taken the money because her mental health can't take any more,' says Mrs Winstanley.
'And she's teaching our next generation.'
Seventy miles away in Dundee, more horror stories. It was just as the RAAC issue was arising that Yvette Hoskins and her husband Wayne put their three-bedroom flat on the market.
They had planned to sell earlier but when mother-of two Mrs Hoskins was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, they stayed put until she was in remission. Their advice was to market the first floor flat at offers over £105,000 but, after learning RAAC was present in the roof of the flat above them, they dropped that price by £5,000.
A couple fell in love with it and a deal was secured – only to fall through when no lender would give them a home loan. RAAC, it turned out, was the kiss of death for a mortgage deal.
'That's when we wholeheartedly understood that a property with RAAC will not sell,' says Mrs Hoskins. They dropped their price to £85,000 and received several offers – but all vanished when mortgages were refused.
Down in price it went again to £69,000, and then to £55,000, before a deal could be secured with a cash buyer.
With a £40,000 mortgage still remaining on the property, the couple will be left with next to nothing to show for their 15 years as owner occupiers once legal fees are settled. The campaign group they are part of has been backed by TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, who has a home in Dundee.
Like her fellow campaigner in Aberdeen, Mrs Hoskins highlights those less fortunate than herself – such as the Dundee man in his early 20s whose RAAC-affected property is now worth almost 40 per cent less than he paid for it.
'He can't move because any offer he got wouldn't cover his outstanding mortgage.
'He'd be going into negative equity through no fault of his own because nobody seemingly knew about RAAC in homes and properties until they were asked to inspect it by the Scottish Government in 2023.' Back then, a catalogue of public buildings, including schools, libraries, hospitals and community centres were already known to contain RAAC.
The lightweight cement, whose texture resembles an Aero chocolate bar, was used in buildings with flat or low-pitched roofs and, alarmingly, was considered to have a lifespan of only 30 years. When exposed to moisture it can become structurally unsound.
Repairs were ordered for public buildings, then the focus shifted to social housing – and the enormity of the issue began to emerge.
Not only were hundreds – and later thousands – of properties identified as containing RAAC, but many had been sold to private owners multiple times since the local authority built them. Almost none of their home reports had flagged up RAAC.
Yet a search of Dundee city archives reveals not only that the local authority knew about RAAC but that it was also aware of potential defects in it as early as the late 1970s.
That, points out Mrs Hoskins, was before right-to-buy legislation was even introduced.
Were these properties, then, mis-sold in the 1980s and thereafter? Did the council have a duty to flag up RAAC – along with the devastating consequences which might lie decades down the line? And what of the other councils across Scotland?
Did Aberdeen fail to divulge this key detail too? Former council leader Alex Nicoll suggested at a public meeting last month that the issue had been known about in the city for decades.
Thus far, Dundee's strategy has been to embark on a programme of reinforcing the affected properties – and to bill private residents for their share of the work, even if they have not agreed to it.
That has resulted in demands for up to £7,000, but many have claimed paying up would be throwing good money after bad.
Even after the repairs, the properties would still contain RAAC and would therefore remain practically unsellable.
A Dundee City Council spokesman said: 'Defects can happen in properties of all construction types and there was no prior equivalent industry-wide concern about RAAC until the issues came to light in schools in England from 2019 onwards.
'Where communal works are undertaken to mixed tenure blocks the council re-charges a proportionate share of the costs of these works to private owners.'
In Tillicoultry, meanwhile, 27 properties – ten privately owned – were declared uninhabitable and shuttered up when RAAC was identified in 2023. Some owners were given hours to clear out.
One, Frances Reid, recalled: 'I got a phone call on my way home from work one day, saying: 'Can you get back now to evacuate your property?' When I got there it was chaos.'
Auxiliary nurse Lynsey McQuater was another owner suddenly declared homeless.
After moving in with her mother, she said: 'I was absolutely distraught, in floods of tears when it happened. I thought I had a home, I had security, I had a plan for my future. That was all ripped away.'
Last week, the council said it would buy back any properties that private owners wished to dispose of, but at a price reflecting the cost of repairs.
Who should pay, then, for this monumental shambles? It is a question Liam Kerr has asked recently-appointed housing minister Mairi McAllan repeatedly.
Indeed, he says, he has already identified an unspent £20million housing pot first allocated to Aberdeen in 2016 which must be used within the next year. The problem? No one seems to know the criteria by which the money could be released.
He suggests the minister had 'ignored this solution entirely'. He tells the Mail: 'The Scottish Government has devolved responsibility for setting RAAC right, which, all-too-predictably, the SNP are paddling frantically to get away from.'
He adds: 'I believe there will be a documentary expose of this, some day soon, about how lives have been destroyed in communities across Scotland, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, while ministers just looked on.'
While the Scottish Government has argued that Westminster must roll out a UK-wide RAAC relief fund, both the previous
Conservative administration and the current Labour one have reminded its ministers that housing is devolved.
So the buck passing goes on.
'Something is going to happen, there's going to be that straw that breaks the back,' warns Paula Fraser, who was rehomed from her Aberdeen property as a result of RAAC.
There are ominous signs that it will be a tragedy.
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Why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born
What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century. 'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.' There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. The experiences of Moggach, an English graduate of Bristol University who was brought up by a literary family in London, are different to those of a coal miner's daughter in Durham – or indeed those of King Charles or Ozzy Osbourne. Not only has no reputable study officially anointed the 1948-ers as the most fortunate cohort in history, a poll commissioned to generate publicity for Call the Midwife, a television show set in the mid-1950s, concluded – unconvincingly and unsurprisingly – that 1956 was actually the best year to be born. The Telegraph dived into the data and the experiences of the 1948 generation – from healthcare to housing, education to employment, music to social mobility – to test the theory. Childhood The 1948-ers were the first babies delivered by the National Health Service. 'If you were born that year, you benefited from a well-funded NHS throughout your life,' says Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at think tank Nuffield Trust. They also benefitted, he argues, from the rapid improvement in healthcare since 1890, a period that established the basics of modern medicine, from widespread vaccinations to blood transfusions. And although infant mortality rates in 1948 were nearly 10 times higher than today, maternity care had also made significant improvements during the first half of the 20th century. As soon as the 1948-ers were safely home from hospital – and as long as they avoided the worst of polio and tuberculosis – the Family Allowances Act of 1945 provided a universal benefit of five shillings per week per child. Few children born in 1948 would have strong memories of rationing, which finally ended in 1954. None would have been old enough to take part in National Service, which stopped in 1960. Meanwhile, many of their parents were enjoying the fastest rises in living standards in modern history. Amid low inflation, men's wages almost doubled between 1951 and 1961, despite working two fewer hours per week over the decade (42 vs 44). Families were increasingly lavish with this disposable income and leisure time. Car ownership rose by 25 per cent between 1957 and 1959, television ownership by 32 per cent. Sixty thousand people per week took a holiday at Butlins, while foreign holidays doubled in the 1950s (and doubled again the following decade). This rising consumption, coupled with generous tax cuts, famously led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957: 'Most of our people have never had it so good.' The 1948-ers' parents seemed to agree, returning 'Supermac' with a majority of 100 seats in the general election of 1959. A cartoon in the Spectator pictured the prime minister surrounded by televisions and washing machines with the caption: 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.' The rise of the teenager This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music. 'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.' According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.' The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.' So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.' Education Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952. Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'. 'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market. 'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.' Employment and housing A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4). The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014. According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers. 'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.' The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East. 'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 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The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again.
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More sugar than chocolate: The best and worst alcohol-free beers for your health
What a time to be alive if you're a teetotaller. Alcohol-free and low-alcohol beers (which typically contain up to 0.5% ABV – around the same amount of alcohol you would find in a ripe banana), are big business. No longer an insipid, metallic-tasting booby prize for designated drivers, the thirst for them is insatiable – with the market worth £380 million in 2024 – and encompasses a dizzying range of stouts, porters and craft wheat beers. However, before you knock them back with joyful abandon, it's worth having a closer look at the label, as many contain a lot more sugar and calories than you may think. There's that attractive-looking bottle of alcohol-free stout which contains more sugar than a Galaxy chocolate bar and enticing blonde beers with more calories than a packet of salty crisps. Which are the best options and the ones to avoid then? From Guinness to Lucky Saint, we rank the leading brands and speak to the experts about how much is safe to drink. The best and worst alcohol-free beers for your health Rated by Sam Rice, Telegraph nutrition expert Nøgne Ø Svart/Hvit Milk Stout Innis & Gunn 0.0% lager Leffe Blonde 0% Abbey Ale Madrí Excepcional 0% Brewdog Punk IPA Alcohol Free Guinness 0.0 Lucky Saint Alcohol Free Lager 7. Nøgne Ø Svart/Hvit Milk Stout Ingredients: water, malted barley, lactose, hops, yeast Wowzers, this wholesome-looking bottle contains a whopping 23g of sugar, the highest by far of those tested. The clue is in the name; lactose is the sugar found in milk, and it has been added here to give the stout its characteristic creamy mouthfeel. Yeast cannot ferment lactose, so it remains in the finished beer, providing a distinct sweetness. A 330ml bottle contains 23g of sugar, equal to a 42g bar of Galaxy chocolate. I think I know which I'd choose, but if you like this beer, then, like Galaxy, it's probably best kept as a treat. Verdict: One point for the fact that it's alcohol free. 6. Innis & Gunn 0.0% lager Ingredients: water, barley, oats, hops. A simple ingredients list is always a great start when it comes to nutrition, but sadly, that's where the good news ends, as this beer is the second-highest in sugar, 4.5g per 100ml, compared with the minuscule 0.1g in Lucky Saint. One 440ml can contains two thirds of the recommended daily sugar intake set by the NHS, which is 30g. Unless you absolutely love this for the taste, which is a valid reason to drink anything, I'd probably choose something else. Verdict: Just the one point for being alcohol-free. 5. Leffe Blonde 0% Abbey Ale Ingredients: water, barley malt, maize, barley, sugar, hops, natural aromas. What this beer gives with one hand – it's pretty low in sugar – it takes with the other; it's the highest in calories of the beers featured, with almost three times that of the Brewdog Punk AF. Blonde ales are an unfiltered beer style known for being high in silicon, or more specifically, orthosilicic acid, which helps the body to build and maintain healthy bones, and may help guard against conditions such as osteoporosis. Each 250ml bottle contains 100 calories, so a couple of those and you're consuming more calories than a standard bag of Walker's ready salted crisps. Verdict: An extra half a point for the silicon. 4. Madrí Excepcional 0%. Ingredients: water, barley malt, wheat, barley, glucose syrup, sucrose, natural flavourings, hops. This beer sits right in the middle of the pack for calories and sugar, so if you love that cool, crisp Spanish cerveza-style lager, then this might be the one for you. But before you pop the top, the addition of glucose syrup, sucrose, and natural flavourings raises a nutritional red flag – we are entering UPF territory here. Verdict: The additives let this down. 3. Brewdog Punk IPA Alcohol Free Ingredients: water, lactose, malted barley, hops, yeast, malted oats, malted wheat, lactic acid. While Brewdog Punk IPA was the lowest in calories, just edging out Lucky Saint, it was much higher in sugar, presumably due to the lactose. This is a method for adding body to beer after the alcohol has been removed. With 6g of sugar per 330ml, this would add up pretty rapidly if you were to enjoy a few cans in the sun. Sometimes, even alcohol-free beers should be enjoyed in moderation. Verdict: Shame about the sugar. 2. Guinness 0.0 Ingredients: water, malted barley, barley, roasted barley, fructose, natural flavourings, hops, yeast I'm reliably informed by beer connoisseurs (my husband!) that Guinness 0.0 is the closest to the real thing of all the zero-alcohol beers. This is likely because it is brewed in the same manner as regular Guinness, utilising a cold filtration method to remove the alcohol. This preserves the flavour as well as plant compounds called polyphenols from the barley, which act as antioxidants in the body to protect cells against cancer-causing compounds called free radicals. Polyphenols are also prebiotics, which feed our good gut bacteria, and they can even help improve circulation and blood pressure. Guinness famously contains energy-boosting iron, too. A 440ml can contains only as many calories as a single Hobnob biscuit, which is half the calories of regular Guinness, and it's also very low in sugar. A win in my book. Verdict: One of the best on the market. 1. Lucky Saint Alcohol Free Lager Ingredients: water, malted barley, hops, yeast. This is the alcohol-free lager I have in my fridge at home. It has a delicious fruitiness and a paltry 53 calories and 0.3g of sugar per can. This simple, unfiltered beer is made with just four ingredients and no additions, such as aromas or flavourings. You'll also be getting a hit of plant polyphenols for some extra gut goodness. Bravo Lucky Saint, you win! Verdict: Not much wrong with this. FAQs How much is safe to drink? A recent study by a research team from University of California San Diego, Knappschaft Kliniken in Germany and the University of the Basque Country in Spain, which was published in the journal Nutrients, suggests that even two bottles of non-alcoholic beer a day is enough to increase blood sugar levels. The authors conclude: 'The consumption of non-alcoholic beverages has unfavourable effects on metabolism, mainly driven by their calorie and sugar contents.' The researchers indicated a long-term risk of Type 2 diabetes and obesity. The study, however, was limited. The cohort was restricted to 44 healthy young men who drank either two 330ml bottles of alcohol-free beer or water every day for four weeks. The team conducted regular tests to check for changes in glucose and lipid metabolism, liver enzymes, body composition, and the composition of the men's gut microbiome – and compared the results between the alcohol free beer drinkers and the water drinkers, so it was not surprising these drinkers fared worse. Nevertheless, consuming alcohol-free beers with high levels of calories and sugar, over time and at volume could have more serious implications for health. What are the main health risks? Clearly, 'the biggest benefit to alcohol-free beer is cutting out the alcohol and typically they add fewer calories to your diet,' says Matt Coulshead, the research and development manager at Gaba Labs, which specialises in neuropsychopharmacology and synthetic chemistry. But the main problem is that the sugar and calorie content varies widely between the different types of beers. The research findings revealed that mixed beer – alcohol-free beer with added lemon or orange soda, for example, raised long-term blood sugar levels and fats in the bloodstream, and wheat beer increased insulin and blood fats. And some lagers, such as one 440ml can of Innis & Gunn 0.0% lager beer, contains 20g of sugar, two thirds of the recommended daily intake. (The NHS recommends that adults consume no more than 30g of added sugar a day, approximately 7tsp.) It's not all bad news, however. According to the NHS, it is not usually a serious problem if your blood sugar is slightly high for a short time – it is when it is sustained that high blood sugar can raise the risk of pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes. Dr Federica Amati, the head nutritionist and global head of communications at Zoe, explains: 'If you consume these products every so often, they're unlikely to do much harm – or good. However, if you're having several cans every day, we don't really know what effects they might have, but it's unlikely to be neutral. These drinks are still providing liquid calories, which we know contribute to worse metabolic health outcomes compared with drinking water, tea or coffee, for example. 'Consuming any sugar and energy in liquid is more harmful for health,' says Dr Amati. 'This is because you can consume them quickly, and we know that the speed you eat – or in this case, drink – increases the risk of weight gain. One can every now and then is only contributing a small amount to our overall dietary pattern, but I wouldn't make this my main drink of choice. It's worth noting that low-alcohol beers do still contain some alcohol. It's in small amounts, but it may still have some negative effects.' The verdict: are non-alcoholic beers really bad for you? Dr Amati concludes: 'In nutrition, the most important question is 'what is it replacing?' If you swap standard beer for non-alcoholic beer, it's absolutely a healthier option. No question. If you swap regular fizzy pop for low-alcohol beer, that's probably a little better. But if you swapped low-alcohol beer for water or kombucha, that's even healthier. 'As with any soft drinks, moderation is key. But if you love the taste of beer, and it's replacing regular beer, you're making a solid choice.'
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- BBC News
Too late to fix Guernsey hospital project black hole, says deputy
The new president of Guernsey's Health and Social Care Committee (HSC) has conceded there was "no political oversight" of the first phase of the hospital modernisation week the BBC revealed the project to build a new critical care unit was delayed because of problems with the building work. Deputy George Oswald, who was a non-States member of the last HSC committee, said "the States does not handle big budget projects well". "I think the problem is lack of resourcing, we try and do things on the cheap probably because we know we're a small island with a small community and not a lot of money," he said. HSC said "sadly but unavoidably, the CCU would continue to be delayed until essential remedial works have been completed" but it did not give a Rihoys and Son said the work to extend the hospital had been BBC understands work is under way to fix the defects by contractors Rihoys and Son, which was commissioned to work on the full hospital modernisation was negotiating with Rihoys about how this work would be funded. Speaking about the problems, Oswald said: "We don't invest in the technical experts we need right at the beginning to ensure the project goes the right way. "I think that was very apparent in phase two."Last year it was revealed officers knew about a potential £30m overspend for phase 2 of the hospital modernisation project. It led to an inquiry which found no problems with the way the States managed big building projects and a review of the hospital project by a UK firm, which has not been publicly released. 'Technologically difficult' Oswald said: "That has now been resolved but possibly too late to influence the problem with the black hole we had and as far as I'm aware certainly didn't involve it at stage one. "It was all sourced in-house because that was the cheapest option but building hospitals and commissioning hospitals is an expensive and technologically difficult thing to do."The NHS is littered with examples of where hospital builds have gone wrong to the detriment of both the local population and also sometimes to the detriment of the builders who got themselves involved in it."
