, Building
A shopfitter in Leicester starts a strip-out on a unit built in 1974. The landlord has handed over an asbestos register with a survey attached, dated four years earlier, and the covering note says no significant risk.
On the second morning a labourer takes a ceiling down and finds insulating board above it. Work stops that hour. The site is sealed, the workers who were in the room are recorded, a licensed contractor is brought in to price an enclosure, and the tenant's opening date moves by about six weeks.
The survey was not wrong. It was the wrong survey. A management survey tells you whether a building is safe to occupy in its current state. It does not tell you what is behind a ceiling you are about to remove.
The duty to manage sits with whoever controls the building
The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 place a duty to manage asbestos in non-domestic premises on the person who has the repairing obligation under the lease, or where there is no such obligation, whoever controls the premises. It also covers the common parts of domestic buildings: stairwells, plant rooms, boiler houses, roof voids.
That duty holder has to take reasonable steps to find out whether asbestos-containing materials are present, presume that materials are asbestos unless there is strong evidence otherwise, record what and where in an asbestos register, assess the risk, make a written management plan, keep it current, and, importantly for a contractor, provide the information to anyone liable to disturb the material.
If you are the contractor, ask for the register before you price the job, not after you win it. If there is no register, or the register is obviously stale, say so in writing and price the survey as a separate item. The default legal position where information is absent is that you must presume asbestos is present.
Age is the crude first filter. Blue and brown asbestos, crocidolite and amosite, were banned in the UK in 1985. White asbestos, chrysotile, was banned in 1999. Any building constructed or refurbished before 2000 can contain it, and the list of products is much longer than most people expect: insulating board around services and behind fire doors, sprayed coatings on steelwork, pipe lagging, cement roof sheets and gutters, textured decorative coatings, vinyl floor tiles and their bitumen adhesive, toilet cisterns, rope seals, fuse boards.
Two surveys, two jobs
The distinction is set out in the HSE's survey guide, HSG264, and it is the single most useful thing a contractor can understand about asbestos.
A management survey locates material that could be disturbed during normal occupation and maintenance. It is minimally intrusive. It is designed to let people use the building safely, and it explicitly does not cover material hidden in the structure.
A refurbishment and demolition survey is fully intrusive. It is destructive by design: ceilings opened, ducts entered, floors lifted, samples taken from anywhere the work will reach. It is carried out in an area that is not occupied, because the survey itself disturbs material. Its purpose is to let a contractor price and plan work with a known scope.
If your work will break into the fabric, you need the second one, covering the area you are working in. The survey has to be commissioned in time for the results to inform the price and the programme, which in practice means several weeks before you start, because the surveyor needs access to an empty area and the samples need analysis.
Surveyors and analysts should be accredited, and it is reasonable to ask which accreditation they hold. This is not a market where the cheapest quote is the useful one.
Licensed, notifiable non-licensed, and everything else
Work with asbestos falls into three categories and they have very different costs.
Licensed work is the higher-risk material: sprayed coatings, lagging, most work with asbestos insulating board. It may only be done by a contractor holding a licence from the HSE. The work must be notified to the enforcing authority, normally with 14 days' notice, carried out under a controlled enclosure with negative pressure, air monitoring throughout, decontamination units, and a four-stage clearance by an independent analyst before the enclosure comes down. Workers need medical examinations and health records.
Notifiable non-licensed work is a middle band: lower-risk material where the work still carries enough exposure to require notification, medical surveillance and record keeping, but not a licence. Removing textured coating with certain methods, or some work on asbestos cement, can fall here depending on how it is done.
Non-licensed work is the rest, and it is still regulated. Training, controlled methods, suppression, proper waste handling. The method used affects the category: the same material removed with a power tool can be licensed work when hand removal intact would not be.
Whichever category, the waste is hazardous waste. It must be double bagged and labelled, moved by a registered carrier, accompanied by a consignment note, and taken to a site permitted to receive it. Records are retained. Fly-tipping asbestos is prosecuted, and the trail leads back to the site it came from.
Programme and price, which is what it actually costs you
The cost that damages a job is rarely the removal. It is the stop.
When asbestos is found unexpectedly, work stops in that area immediately. You establish who may have been exposed and record it, because that record may matter decades later. You get the material sampled and analysed. You get a price and a date from a licensed contractor, and licensed contractors have order books. You wait for notification periods to run. Then the enclosure goes up, the work is done, the analyst clears it, and only then does your own work resume.
Six weeks is a realistic figure for a straightforward licensed removal found mid-job, and it can be considerably longer. Meanwhile the site is staffed or demobilised, the client is asking about the opening date, and your programme has a hole in it.
Three things reduce that exposure. Price the refurbishment and demolition survey as a precondition of starting, and refuse to start without it or without an explicit written instruction from the client accepting the risk. Put a clause in your contract that suspends time and allows cost for the discovery of asbestos not identified in the information provided to you, because without it you may be carrying a delay you did not cause. And train the people doing the stripping out to recognise the common materials and to stop, because the worst outcome is not the six week delay. It is a room full of people who did not know and carried on.
Anyone whose work may disturb asbestos must have asbestos awareness training. That is a legal requirement, not a good practice.
Where this shows up in the game
Construction arrives in Business Baron with the Property & Construction Track, an add-on to the full game. Building work is a project with a timetable, and a job that stops mid-strip is a job paying its costs while it earns nothing. Skipping the survey is cheaper on most jobs, which is exactly why people do it.