Asbestos Removal in Guildford

Asbestos turns up in ordinary places. A garage roof in Burpham. A textured ceiling in a Stoughton semi. Floor tiles under a carpet in Onslow Village that nobody has lifted since the seventies. None of it is an emergency if it is in one piece and left alone. It becomes a problem the moment somebody drills it, breaks it or lets it weather for another decade.

What we take away

Most jobs are one of a short list of materials.

Corrugated cement sheet is the big one. It roofs garages, sheds, workshops and the odd stable, and it is what most people mean when they say they have asbestos. It was used everywhere from the 1950s until the mid 1980s, so any detached or semi-detached garage of that age in Guildford is worth a second look. We take the sheets down whole where we can, wrap them, and clear the site.

Inside the house it is usually textured coating on a ceiling, thermoplastic floor tiles, a cold water tank in the loft, or rope and gasket around an old boiler. Some of that we remove. Some of it is better sealed and left where it is.

Then there are the materials that need a licensed contractor: insulating board, pipe lagging and loose fill. We do not pretend otherwise, and we do not treat them as ordinary work.

The full list is on the services page, grouped by where the material actually lives in a building rather than by trade jargon.

How to tell whether your garage roof is asbestos

Look at the profile first. Asbestos cement sheet has a wide, shallow corrugation and a grey, slightly chalky surface that goes green with moss on the north side. Steel sheet has a tighter, sharper profile and rusts at the cut edges. Plastic goes brittle and yellow.

Then look at a broken edge, from a distance. Asbestos cement shows fine fibres in the break, like the edge of a cracker. Fibre cement made after 1999 looks similar but the fibres are cellulose, and you cannot tell the two apart by eye with any confidence.

Age is the strongest clue you have. Blue and brown asbestos were banned in 1985 and white in 1999, so anything built or refurbished before 2000 may contain it. A garage put up with the house in 1968 almost certainly does.

None of that is proof. Nobody can confirm asbestos by looking at it, and anyone who tells you otherwise on a driveway is guessing. A sample and a lab test is the only certainty, and an asbestos survey costs £200 to £400.

What it costs

Indicative ranges, all of them dependent on size, access and condition.

A single garage roof is £450 to £1,200. A double is £750 to £2,500. Taking the whole garage down, sheets and frame together, runs £1,500 to £2,500. A shed is £400 to £600. Cement sheet works out at roughly £50 per square metre once you are into larger areas.

Inside, textured coating on a 20 square metre ceiling is £2,750 to £6,000. Encapsulation, which means sealing the material rather than removing it, is nearer £30 per square metre and is often the better call on a sound ceiling. Floor tiles are £15 to £30 per square metre, more if there is bitumen adhesive underneath that has to be scraped. Insulating board is licensed work and sits at £200 to £300 per square metre.

Two things push a price up more than anything else. Scaffolding, where access needs it, adds £300 to £600. And disposal by weight, at £0.55 to £0.80 per kilogram, which is why a soaked, broken roof costs more than the same roof in one piece.

There is a fuller breakdown on the cost page. For your job, send a photo and get a fixed price instead of a range.

Licensed, notifiable and non-licensed work

This matters more than most trade websites let on.

The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 split the work into three. Non-licensed work covers intact asbestos cement, most floor tiles and drilling textured coatings under controls. Notifiable non-licensed work is a middle tier that has to be reported to the Health and Safety Executive before it starts, with medical surveillance and health records kept for forty years. Licensed work covers sprayed coatings, pipe lagging, loose fill and insulating board where the job is not short duration.

We carry out non-licensed and notifiable non-licensed work directly. For licensable materials we arrange an HSE-licensed contractor and stay involved until the paperwork is in your hand.

The reason we are careful about the wording is Regulation 8. Carrying out licensable work without a licence is a criminal offence, not a technicality. Any firm that quotes you a suspiciously cheap price for stripping insulating board out of an airing cupboard is either misdescribing the material or breaking the law, and you do not want to be the address where that gets discovered.

Around 5,000 people a year in Great Britain still die of asbestos-related disease. The regulations are strict because the exposure that causes it happened decades before anyone got ill.

Is it safe to leave it where it is?

Often, yes. Asbestos cement in good condition, sitting on a garage roof and not being disturbed, is low risk. The fibres are bound into the cement. They only become airborne when the material is broken, cut, drilled, sanded or left to weather until the surface breaks down.

The honest answer to a lot of enquiries is that nothing needs doing yet. What changes that:

A sheet has cracked, slipped or blown off. Moss and frost have got into the surface and it is flaking. Something is going to be drilled, screwed into or knocked through. You are having solar panels, a new roof, a loft conversion or a rewire, and a trade is about to work near it. Or you are selling, and a buyer's survey has flagged it.

The material that genuinely does need attention sooner is insulating board and loose fill. Board is much softer than cement, it releases fibres far more readily, and loose fill in a loft is the highest risk material you will find in a house. Both are licensed work.

When sealing beats removing

Encapsulation means sealing the surface so fibres cannot escape, and leaving the material in place. At roughly £30 per square metre against £50 and up for removal, it is cheaper, quicker and less disruptive.

It suits a sound artex ceiling you want to skim over, cement sheet in a workshop that is structurally fine, or board behind a boiler that would cost more to strip than to seal. It does not suit a roof that has already weathered through, anything that keeps getting knocked, or a material you will have to disturb within a couple of years anyway.

If you seal rather than remove, write down what is there and where. That record is what stops the next owner, or the next electrician, finding out the hard way.

What happens after you send a photo

Four steps, and the first one takes you a minute.

Send a photo of the roof, the ceiling or the tank, with your postcode. You get an indicative range back, usually the same day, and an honest answer about whether it is licensed work.

If the price works, we confirm access and give you a fixed quote. No hourly rates, no surprise scaffolding line at the end.

On the day we sheet the area, keep the material wet, take it down whole where possible and double-bag anything that has broken. Hazardous waste is wrapped, labelled and carried by a registered waste carrier to a site permitted to take it.

Afterwards you get the consignment note. Keep it for three years at minimum. When you sell, that piece of paper is the difference between a straightforward answer and an awkward one.

Asbestos in Guildford housing

Guildford builds tell you a lot before anyone opens a loft hatch.

The post-war council estates at Park Barn, Bellfields and Stoughton were built in exactly the period when asbestos cement was the cheapest way to roof an outbuilding, and a good number of those garages and coal stores still have the original sheets. The 1930s to 1970s suburban stock at Burpham, Merrow, Onslow Village and Westborough is the classic detached-garage picture: a shallow-pitched corrugated roof, thirty years of moss, and a homeowner who wants a new car port.

Anything built or refurbished before 2000 is in scope, which covers most of the town inside the A3. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces nearer the centre are less likely to have cement sheet on the main house, but their later garages and lean-tos often do.

Landlords and anyone running a commercial building have a further duty. Regulation 4 puts a duty to manage asbestos on non-domestic premises and on the common parts of residential blocks, which means knowing what is there and keeping a record of it, not simply reacting when something breaks.

Where we work

We are based in Guildford and work outward from it. The A3 takes us north to Woking and Leatherhead, the A31 over the Hog's Back to Farnham, Aldershot and Farnborough, and the A281 and A29 south to Godalming, Cranleigh, Haslemere and Dorking.

Every town has its own page with local detail, including which council area it sits in and where the nearest household waste recycling centre is. Start at areas we cover.