Asbestos Licence for Builders: When UK Trades Legally Need One

Every builder who works on a building put up before 2000 is working around asbestos. It sits in ceiling tiles, floor tiles, pipe lagging, cement roof sheets, textured coatings and insulating board, and it does not announce itself. The question most trades ask is whether they need an asbestos licence to touch it. The honest answer is that most jobs do not, some jobs absolutely do, and a third category sits in between and catches people out. The three categories that decide everything Under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, work with asbestos falls into three groups: licensable work, non-licensed work, and notifiable non-licensed work. Which group a job falls into is decided by the material, its condition, how long the job takes and how much fibre the work is likely to release. It is not decided by how confident you feel or how many years you have been in the trade. When you legally need an HSE asbestos licence You need a licence from the Health and Safety Executive when the work is high risk: where exposure is not sporadic and of low intensity, or where you cannot demonstrate that exposure will stay below the control limit of 0.1 fibres per cubic centimetre of air. In practice that covers the following. Removal of sprayed coatings, often called limpet asbestos. Work that may disturb pipe lagging. Work involving loose fill insulation. Work on asbestos millboard. Removal of asbestos insulating board or asbestos insulation that is not short duration. Cleaning up significant quantities of loose or fine asbestos debris. Licensing also follows the work sideways. Erecting scaffolding that is likely to disturb asbestos is licensable work, which is why scaffolders on refurbishment jobs need to know what is above their heads before they start. Carrying out licensable work without a licence is a criminal offence, and the licence is held by the company rather than the individual. If you are a sole trader, the licence sits in your business name. What you can do without a licence Non-licensed work is work that is sporadic and of low intensity, where exposure stays below the control limit and the material is in reasonable condition. Typical examples are drilling into textured decorative coatings to hang a shelf or fit a fixture, painting or repainting asbestos insulating board that is undamaged, and removing asbestos cement roof sheets or guttering where the sheets are unbolted and lowered whole rather than broken up. The words "not broken up" carry most of the weight here. Crack a cement sheet and you have changed the job, the risk and possibly the legal category. Notifiable non-licensed work, the category people miss Some non-licensed work still has to be notified to the enforcing authority before it starts, and it brings medical surveillance and record keeping with it. This is notifiable non-licensed work, usually shortened to NNLW. It tends to cover work on asbestos paper, cardboard and cement products that are being substantially broken up, along with some short duration work on damaged insulating board. If you are not sure whether a job is NNLW, treat it as licensable until someone competent tells you otherwise. What the licence costs and how long it takes The HSE publishes its current assessment fee at £3,683 for a new licence, with the same figure for a renewal. The fee is not refundable if the application fails or is withdrawn, and it pays for the assessment of your management systems and competence rather than for the licence itself. The HSE aims to process new applications within eight weeks of payment being confirmed, and the assessment includes an inspector reviewing how you plan, supervise and record the work. A first licence is normally granted for one year, renewals normally run to three years, and a copy of the licence has to be displayed at every site where licensable work is being carried out. For a small building firm, that fee and the management systems behind it are a serious commitment. It is one of the reasons most builders work with a licensed removal contractor rather than holding a licence themselves. Asbestos awareness training is not a licence Every tradesperson who might disturb asbestos needs asbestos awareness training, and it is short and inexpensive. It teaches you to recognise suspect materials, stop work and report. It does not permit you to remove anything licensable, and no amount of training turns a non-licensed task into a licensed one. Keep the certificate. Main contractors and commercial clients increasingly ask for it before you are allowed to start on site. A waste carrier licence is a different document Builders often hold a waste carrier licence and assume it covers asbestos. It does not. Waste carrier registration lets you transport waste legally; it says nothing about whether you may remove asbestos from a building. Asbestos waste also has to go to a permitted site and be consigned correctly, and dropping it into a general skip is an offence in its own right. What this means when you price a job Before you price a refurbishment, get the asbestos information in writing. On domestic work the homeowner usually has nothing, so the sensible step is a refurbishment and demolition survey carried out by a competent surveyor before the strip out begins, rather than a management survey that only samples what is easy to reach. Build the survey into the programme and the price, and put a line in your quotation saying that the price assumes no asbestos containing materials are present and that removal, if anything is found, will be carried out by others. That single clause has saved more builders more money than any other sentence in a quotation. It also protects the client, who is the person legally responsible for the premises in most non-domestic jobs under the duty to manage. How clients check whether you are legitimate Homeowners and main contractors are getting better at checking. They ask for the licence number, the expiry date and the name on the licence, and they compare it against the HSE's published list of licensed contractors. A builder who can answer those questions quickly wins the job over one who cannot. This is the same principle behind verification on NoaPro: a profile that shows your accreditations, insurance and licence details in one place does the checking for the client before they pick up the phone. If you are unsure which category a job falls into, stop and get advice. The HSE's asbestos pages set out the licensed and non-licensed definitions in plain terms, and a licensed contractor will usually tell you over the phone whether a job is theirs or yours. Getting that call right is cheaper than getting it wrong. If you run a trade business and want to be found by clients who are already checking credentials, list your business free on NoaPro at noapro.co.uk and show the paperwork that wins the work.