Asbestos Survey in Leeds

Management surveys and refurbishment and demolition surveys

A management survey is a non-destructive inspection of a building that is going to stay in use. The surveyor works through every area that can be reached without damaging the fabric, identifies materials that are or may be asbestos containing, records their location, extent, type and condition, and either samples them or records them as presumed. The output is an asbestos register, a material and priority risk assessment for each item, and recommendations that usually amount to leaving a material in place, labelling it, and inspecting it periodically, because undisturbed asbestos in good condition is generally safer left alone than removed.

A refurbishment and demolition survey starts from a different premise: that everything in the affected area is about to be broken into, so everything has to be found first. It is intrusive and it does damage. Ceiling tiles come down, panels come off, floor coverings are lifted, boxing is opened, service risers are entered. The premises, or at least the part being worked on, normally has to be empty of people during the inspection and remain so until the area is cleared. The report tells the contractor precisely what is present and where, so that licensed work is planned properly, non-licensed work is controlled, and nobody drills into an insulating board in the belief that it is plasterboard.

Choosing between them is straightforward once you fix on what happens next. If nothing is being disturbed and you simply need to know and manage what is there, the management survey is correct. If any part of the building is being stripped, extended, rewired, reroofed, converted or demolished, the refurbishment and demolition survey is the only one that discharges the obligation, and it has to be completed before the work is designed rather than after the scaffolding goes up.

• Management survey: non-destructive, building in use, produces the register and management plan a duty holder relies on day to day.
• Refurbishment and demolition survey: intrusive and destructive, area normally vacated, produces the information a contractor needs before breaking into anything.
• Both record location, extent, product type, condition, surface treatment and asbestos type for every item found or presumed.
• Both give each item a material assessment score and, on a management survey, a priority assessment reflecting how the space is actually used.
• Neither is a removal service, and neither obliges you to remove anything that is in sound condition and undisturbed.
• A management survey does not cover you for building work, and a refurbishment survey of one floor does not cover the floor above it.
• Presumed materials are recorded as presumed and treated as asbestos until sampling proves otherwise.
• Samples go to a UKAS accredited laboratory, because no surveyor can identify asbestos content by looking at it.

The duty to manage, and who it actually applies to

Under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 there is an explicit duty to manage asbestos in non-domestic premises. It falls on whoever has responsibility for maintenance and repair of the building, which in practice means the owner, the employer, the managing agent or the tenant, depending on what the lease says. The duty is not satisfied by a vague awareness that the building is old. It requires you to take reasonable steps to find out whether asbestos is present, to presume it is present where you cannot rule it out, to record what you find in a register, to assess the risk, to prepare and put into effect a written plan for managing it, and to give the information to anyone likely to disturb the material.

The point most commonly missed in Leeds concerns residential blocks. A single privately owned house is outside the duty to manage. The common parts of a block of flats are not: stairwells, landings, plant rooms, bin stores, boiler houses, service risers and roof spaces serving the whole building are non-domestic for these purposes, and the freeholder or the management company carries the duty. Given how many Leeds villas in Headingley, Chapel Allerton and Roundhay were converted into flats in exactly the decades when asbestos products were at their most widely used, that catches a lot of buildings whose owners have never thought about it.

There is no duty to manage asbestos in your own home, but there is still the law that governs work on it. Anyone carrying out construction or maintenance work has duties under the same regulations, and a contractor who disturbs asbestos in a domestic property is committing the same offence as one who does it in a factory. That is why builders in Leeds increasingly refuse to start on a pre-2000 house without a refurbishment survey, and why the homeowner who did not commission one ends up paying for a stopped job, an out of hours clearance and a delayed programme.

Where asbestos turns up in Leeds buildings

The materials follow the building type and the decade, and Leeds has a lot of both. The post-war municipal housing programme, the mill and warehouse stock, the 1960s and 1970s office building around the city centre, and the ordinary run of suburban semis with a garage and an outhouse each bring their own list.

These are the places our surveyors find it most often across the district.

• Textured decorative coatings to ceilings and walls in housing from the 1960s to the mid 1980s, right across Seacroft, Swarcliffe, Middleton, Belle Isle, Halton Moor and Cottingley, and in private housing of the same period everywhere else.
• Corrugated asbestos cement roofs on detached garages, outhouses and workshops behind inter-war semis at Crossgates, Halton, Moortown and Beeston, often with matching cement gutters and downpipes.
• Asbestos insulating board lining airing cupboards, boxing in around boilers and warm air heaters, forming bath panels, meter cupboard backs, soffits and the cores of older fire doors.
• Thermoplastic and vinyl floor tiles with black bitumen adhesive beneath them in 1960s and 1970s kitchens, halls and communal stairwells, frequently covered over rather than removed.
• Pipe and boiler lagging in the basements and service runs of Victorian commercial buildings in the city centre and in converted mills around Holbeck, Hunslet and the Kirkstall Road corridor.
• Sprayed coatings to structural steelwork and soffits in office and industrial buildings put up between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, which is licensed work and among the highest risk material of all.
• Cement flue pipes, soffit and fascia boards, cold water tanks in roof spaces, and the flat garage roofs and canopies of post-war semi-detached housing.
• Rope gaskets and seals around old boilers, back boilers and flues, and asbestos backing boards behind fuse boxes and within storage heaters.

How the inspection is done and what the report gives you

The surveyor works to a planned sequence through the building, area by area, recording every material that is or may be asbestos containing, with its location, the extent in square or linear measure, the product type, the condition of the surface, and whether it is sealed, encapsulated or exposed. Where the instruction allows sampling, small samples are taken under controlled conditions with the area protected and made good afterwards. Where sampling is not possible, or would itself release fibres, the item is recorded as presumed and treated exactly as though it had tested positive.

Every item then gets a material assessment: a score built from the product type, the extent of any damage, the surface treatment and the type of asbestos, which together indicate how readily the material would release fibres if disturbed. On a management survey each item also gets a priority assessment, which is about the building in use rather than the material in isolation: how often people are in the space, what they do there, how likely somebody is to knock into it, and how often maintenance work goes on nearby. A pipe insulation in a locked plant room and the same insulation in a school corridor score very differently, and the management plan reflects that.

You receive a register listing every item with a unique reference, a drawing or floor plan marking them, photographs, the laboratory results where samples were taken, and recommendations. Those recommendations are proportionate. Sound, sealed, undisturbed material is normally best managed in place with labelling and periodic reinspection. Damaged material in an area people use is a different matter and gets prioritised accordingly. Removal is recommended where the material is deteriorating, where it will be disturbed by planned work, or where it cannot be managed sensibly in its current position.

Instructing an asbestos survey in Leeds

Tell us what is going to happen to the building, because that decides which survey you need before anything else is discussed. A landlord taking on a parade of shops in Headingley or Chapel Allerton, a managing agent who has inherited a converted villa with no register, an employer in a 1970s unit at Cross Green or Stourton, a developer converting a mill at Holbeck, and a homeowner about to have a 1970s kitchen ripped out are five different instructions, and only one of them is a management survey.

For a purchase, timing matters. A buyer of a pre-2000 commercial building should see the asbestos position before exchange, because responsibility for the duty to manage transfers with the building and an absent register is a liability you are taking on rather than a problem you inherit later. On a domestic purchase there is no legal duty waiting for you, but if you are buying a 1960s or 1970s house with the intention of stripping it back, finding out what is in the ceilings before you agree a price is worth considerably more than finding out on the first day of the works.

We work alongside the rest of the reporting on a building rather than in isolation. A survey or valuation will note suspected asbestos materials where they are visible, but no survey samples anything, so the asbestos survey is always a separate instruction with its own scope. Where a report leads to removal, that is specialist contractor work, and higher risk materials such as sprayed coatings, lagging and most insulating board can only be handled by a licensed contractor with notice given to the enforcing authority. We can tell you which category your material falls into, which is usually the first thing anybody wants to know.