Agricultural Asbestos Removal in Guildford

Farm and equestrian buildings are where the largest areas of asbestos cement in Surrey still sit, and where the practicalities differ most from a domestic job.

The material is the same. Corrugated cement sheet on the roof, sometimes flat or profiled sheet on the walls, occasionally cement guttering and ridge. What is different is the scale, the condition and the access.

The three things that set the price

Area. Cement removal is around £50 per square metre, indicative, and a barn roof is a large multiple of a garage roof. Measure along the ridge and down the slope, then double it for both pitches. That gives a figure worth talking about.

Condition. This matters more on farm buildings than anywhere else. Domestic garage roofs are usually intact. Agricultural roofs have often been shedding fragments for years, and substantially damaged cement is notifiable non-licensed work rather than plain non-licensed work. It is still work we carry out directly. It needs HSE notification before it starts, which affects the date rather than the price.

Access. Almost always the largest variable. A building beside a concrete yard with room for a lorry is one job. The same building at the end of four hundred metres of soft track, reachable only by telehandler in dry weather, is a considerably longer one. Every load has to reach a hard standing and every trip is time.

Disposal is the other big line, at £0.55 to £0.80 per kilogram. On a barn roof the tonnage is real, and on a large building disposal can exceed the labour.

What usually gets missed

Ground contamination. Fragments from a failing roof end up in the yard, in the gutters, in the grass line along the eaves and sometimes spread across a field by wind and machinery. Collecting them is slower than removing the roof, because each piece has to be found. It should be on the quote explicitly rather than assumed either way.

Wall sheeting. Plenty of these buildings have cement cladding as well as a cement roof, which doubles the material and changes the access.

Guttering and trim. Cement gutters, ridge caps and barge boards were standard on buildings of this type and are usually the most weathered parts.

Old sheets stacked behind the building. Very common on farms, where a previous repair left the replaced sheets leaning against a wall for twenty years. That is waste collection and it is cheap to add to a job that is already happening.

Working around livestock and the season

Animals cannot be under or immediately beside a roof being stripped, and that shapes the programme more than anything technical.

Stables and field shelters usually get phased so that stabling remains available at one end while the other is worked on, or the work is timed to a period when horses are out. Feed, bedding and stored crop have to be moved or covered, because sheeting a hay store is not the same as sheeting a garage.

Season matters too. A soft track in February is a different proposition from the same track in July, and on many holdings the practical answer is to plan the work for dry ground rather than to fight it.

What goes back on

Almost nobody replaces cement with cement.

Box profile steel is the usual answer on a barn or a stable block, fixing to the same purlins. Where the frame is sound, and on buildings of this age it very often is, the reroof is a straightforward job once the old sheets are away.

We strip and remove rather than reroof. Keeping the two separate normally costs less than one firm quoting both, and it means the asbestos side is priced by someone who does it every week.

Around Guildford

The agricultural buildings in this category sit in a ring around the town rather than in it.

Out towards Normandy, Pirbright, Worplesdon and Ash to the west and north-west. Shere, Albury, Chilworth, Wonersh and Bramley to the south and east, along the foot of the North Downs and into the Surrey Hills. Effingham, East Horsley and West Horsley to the north-east, and the smallholdings scattered between them.

The pattern across all of them is similar. Buildings put up between the 1950s and the 1970s, roofed in cement sheet because it was cheap and fireproof, maintained rarely, and now at the end of their life at the same time as the frame underneath is still perfectly good.

The other local factor is that many of these holdings sit within the Surrey Hills National Landscape or in Green Belt, which affects what can be built rather than what can be removed. Taking a roof off is not usually a planning question. Putting a different building up in its place may well be, and that is a conversation with the council rather than with us.

We work across Guildford and the surrounding towns. The areas we cover page lists them.