A licensed asbestos contractor should be ready for the Health and Safety Executive to walk on site at any moment, without warning. In March 2025, that is exactly what happened — the HSE visited two live Innov8 UK Group projects unannounced, including a heritage industrial demolition site in Loughborough and a commercial removal in Harrogate.
When an HSE inspector arrives on an asbestos job, they examine the whole operation: is the enclosure built and sealed correctly, is it under proper negative pressure, is the decontamination unit in use, are hold points in the plan of work being signed off in the right order, and is the site diary a genuine live record of what is happening?
At the Loughborough site — a 1970s industrial unit being stripped and demolished, where our teams removed thermal insulation debris and asbestos cement under two purpose-built enclosures — the inspector fed back minor points around keeping the plan of work updated on site and signing hold points at the right stage. We responded immediately: revised plan-of-work pages were printed on site the same day, and hole punches and laminators were added to every supervisor's site kit so amendments are always filed correctly going forward.
The value of an HSE visit is not just passing it — it is what you learn. Every point raised was closed out, circulated to site teams by memo, and reviewed at our monthly management meeting. This is how a licensed contractor improves: independent scrutiny, honest response, and a system that gets tighter every time.
For anyone commissioning asbestos work, unannounced HSE inspections are a powerful reassurance. They mean your contractor is not marking their own homework. Innov8 UK Group welcomes that scrutiny — it is central to how we protect the people on our sites and the buildings we work in.
