It is one of the most common calls we take. An electrician chasing a wall, a plumber lifting a floor, a joiner cutting a ceiling to run a cable — competent trades doing ordinary work in a building nobody had surveyed. The first anyone knows about the asbestos is when it is already in the air.
This is not usually a story about cowboys. It is a story about information that never reached the person holding the drill. Here is what to do in the first hour, and how to make sure there is no first hour next time.
The first hour matters more than the next month
If you think you have cut, drilled, sanded, broken or lifted something that might contain asbestos, HSE’s instruction is short: stop work immediately, then speak to your employer or the building owner to find out whether there is asbestos in the building.
In practice, that means:
- Stop. Put the tool down. Do not finish the cut, and do not “just tidy up”.
- Get everyone out of the room or area, and keep them out. That includes anyone who wandered in to look.
- Do not sweep, brush or vacuum. A domestic or workshop vacuum will push fibres straight back into the room through the exhaust. Sweeping does the same thing more slowly.
- Leave the debris where it is. Close the door, and tape it shut if you can.
- Do not take your clothing home. If overalls or work clothes are dusty, they stay on site until someone competent tells you how to deal with them.
- Tell the duty holder — the building owner, landlord, managing agent or facilities manager — in writing, the same day.
- Get it sampled before anyone decides what to do next. A laboratory result settles what the material is; a guess does not.
Most disturbances we attend are smaller than the person who caused them fears. But the size of the job is decided by what happens in the first hour. Sweeping up a broken ceiling tile turns a contained problem into a spread one, and a spread one costs considerably more to put right.
Why it keeps happening
Asbestos was used in British building until it was banned in 1999 — blue and brown asbestos had already been banned in 1985. Any building put up or refitted before 2000 can contain it, and the trades most exposed to it today are among those HSE names: maintenance and repair, refurbishment and retrofitting, demolition and installation work such as fitting smart meters. Not asbestos removal — ordinary building work.
The scale is not historic. HSE describes asbestos as a Class 1 carcinogen “known to kill around 20 tradespeople each week due to past exposure”, and says around 5,000 people a year die of asbestos-related diseases in Great Britain. Those deaths are the result of exposures decades ago, which is exactly why an exposure today does not feel like anything at the time.
Marking Global Asbestos Awareness Week in April 2026, HSE set out the most common pitfalls its inspectors find — and reminded duty holders that inspectors can visit premises without warning. The three it names: asbestos management plans not in place to keep the condition of materials monitored, inadequate information, instruction and training, and procedures for managing work liable to disturb asbestos that need improving.
That third one is the gap our phone rings out of. The information usually exists somewhere. It just never travelled from the file to the person on the ladder.
What a tradesman should ask for before starting
Your employer has to find this out before you start, and asking for it is not being difficult.
- “Is there an asbestos register for this building, and can I have a copy?” For non-domestic premises there should be one. The duty holder is required to make sure everyone who needs to know where the asbestos is, is told — HSE names in-house maintenance workers and external contractors specifically.
- “Has a refurbishment and demolition survey been done for the area I’m working in?” A management survey is not the same document. An R&D survey has to locate and identify materials hidden inside the building fabric before structural work begins — inside ceiling voids, behind panels, under floors. If your work is intrusive, that is the survey that matters.
- “Was this building built or refitted before 2000?” If nobody can answer, treat the answer as yes until a survey says otherwise.
And one thing worth being clear about: asbestos awareness training does not allow you to work on asbestos. It is training to recognise it and stop. Anything beyond that needs the right category of training, and the higher-risk materials need a licensed contractor.
If the answers do not come, that is your answer. Price the delay, not the incident.
What the duty holder has to have in place
If you are responsible for a non-domestic building — an owner, a landlord, a managing agent, or the person responsible under a repairing lease — the duty to manage sits with you. It also covers the common parts of residential blocks.
The duty is not a survey in a drawer. It is:
- a register of what is present, where it is and what condition it is in;
- a management plan that says who monitors it, how often, and what happens if it is damaged;
- information given to anyone who might disturb it, before they start, in a form they will actually read;
- a refurbishment and demolition survey commissioned before intrusive work — and HSE strongly recommends using an accredited surveying organisation, with UKAS the sole recognised accreditation body in Great Britain for asbestos inspection bodies carrying out surveys.
The cheapest version of all of this is a survey. The most expensive version is the one where a contractor finds it for you.
Homeowners: the duty doesn’t apply, the risk does
The duty to manage covers non-domestic premises. It does not cover your own house — which means nobody is going to hand you a register before you start on the kitchen.
Pre-2000 homes routinely contain asbestos in places people disturb without thinking: Artex and textured coatings on ceilings and walls, asbestos cement garage and outhouse roofs, insulating board around fireplaces, airing cupboards and behind heaters, vinyl floor tiles with black bitumen adhesive, soffits and rainwater goods, cold-water tanks and flue pipes.
In our experience the two we are called to most often are sanding, scraping or drilling a textured coating, and breaking or dropping cement sheets while taking a garage roof off.
The fix is not complicated: test before you disturb. A laboratory sample settles it, and a result costs a small fraction of what a clean-up costs.
What happens when we get the call
Every job is different, but the shape is consistent:
- Assessment. What material, what condition, how far it has spread, who was in the area, what has been touched since.
- Sampling, if the material has not already been identified.
- Containment. Depending on the material and the spread, that can range from sealing an area to building a full enclosure under negative pressure.
- Removal and clean under the right controls for the material — licensed work, notifiable non-licensed work, or non-licensed work, and the quote says which.
- Air monitoring, and for licensed work a four-stage clearance. HSE recommends the clearance analyst is independently sourced and employed by the building owner or occupier, and we will arrange that for you or work alongside an analyst you appoint.
- Waste double-bagged, consigned and taken to a licensed facility.
- Paperwork — what was found, what was done, what remains, and an updated register for the building.
Licensable work must also be notified to the enforcing authority using the ASB5 form at least 14 days before it starts — a shorter period only where the enforcing authority agrees to it.
If it has already happened today
Stop work, keep people out, don’t clean it up, and call someone licensed before you decide anything else. We are an HSE-licensed contractor (licence 242606081) and we can usually tell you from photographs and a postcode whether what you are looking at is a problem, before anyone quotes anything.
0333 335 6375 — or send photographs and we will tell you what you are looking at, free.
Common questions
I’ve drilled one hole in an Artex ceiling. Is that an emergency?
It is not an emergency, but it is not nothing either. Stop, keep the room closed, do not vacuum the dust, and get the material tested. Textured coatings are usually non-licensed work, so a single small disturbance is normally a contained job — as long as nobody spreads it first.
Can I clean it up myself if it’s my own house?
The Control of Asbestos Regulations apply to work activities, so they do not bite on a householder doing DIY in their own home — but HSE strongly encourages using trained professionals, and the waste rules apply to you either way. There is no safe way to sweep or vacuum asbestos dust with ordinary equipment, and the waste cannot go in a general waste skip or a household bin; some councils take small quantities of household asbestos by appointment. If the material is broken and dusty, get it tested and get a price. It is a smaller job than most people expect.
My employer sent me into a building with no survey. Where do I stand?
Your employer is required to find out whether asbestos is present before work starts, and to give you that information. If they cannot answer, stopping and saying so is the right call — HSE’s guidance to workers is to stop work immediately and speak to your employer or the building owner. How that plays out contractually is an employment question rather than an asbestos one.
Does asbestos awareness training mean I can remove it?
No. Awareness training is there so you can recognise asbestos and stop work. It does not qualify anyone to work on it, and it does not qualify anyone to work on licensable materials.
Who pays when a tradesman disturbs asbestos?
That depends on the contract and on whether the duty holder provided the information they were required to provide, so it is a question for the parties involved and their insurers — we are asbestos contractors, not lawyers. What we can say is that the cost of the survey is almost always smaller than the cost of the argument.
