Asbestos surveys for office buildings

What an office of this era is actually holding

The commercial building boom that produced most of our office stock ran straight through the peak years of asbestos specification. Blue and brown asbestos were banned in 1985, white asbestos not until 1999, so a 1972 tower and a 1996 business park unit are different problems with the same answer: assume it is there until someone has looked.

What I find, and roughly where:

• Sprayed coating on the structural frame in 1960s and 1970s buildings, usually limpet, usually above the ceiling line where nobody sees it
• Asbestos insulating board in column and beam casings, riser panels, fire breaks in the ceiling void and the spandrel panels under the windows
• Ceiling tiles, and the ductwork, lagging and gaskets sitting in the void above them
• Textured coatings on ceilings and soffits, common in offices carved out of older buildings
• Floor tiles and the black bitumen adhesive under them, which survives several carpet changes
• Plant room insulation, rope seals, flash guards in old distribution boards and the odd fire door core

The pattern matters. The material that hurts an office project is almost never the tile you can see. It is the AIB fire break the ceiling contractor puts a screwdriver through at seven in the morning.

Landlord or tenant: read the lease before anyone books anything

Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 puts the duty to manage on whoever holds responsibility for maintenance and repair of the non-domestic premises, and in a multi-let office that is decided by the lease, not by who occupies the desk. In practice the landlord or managing agent carries the common parts, plant rooms, risers and shared services, and a tenant on a full repairing lease carries the demise.

Both can hold duties in the same building at the same time, which is where it goes wrong. I have been called to buildings where the managing agent held a register covering the lobby and the plant room, three tenants had never seen it, and one of them had already taken a ceiling grid down. If you cannot point to the repairing clause that settles it, you do not yet know whether the duty is yours.

The point where a management survey stops being enough

A management survey is written for normal occupation. It is not designed to go inside the fabric, and it does not pretend to. The moment work will disturb the building, a Cat A or Cat B fit-out, a strip-out, partition changes, a ceiling replacement, new services through the risers, you need an intrusive survey of the areas affected before anyone starts.

Contractors will ask for it, and their insurers will ask them. The cost of the survey is trivial next to a stopped programme: an unexpected AIB find in a live building means the floor is out of use, an enclosure goes up, the licensed contractor prices it as an emergency, and the tenant is asking who is paying for the delay. That sequence is entirely avoidable and I have watched it play out more times than I care to count.

Which survey your office needs

For occupation and for the duty to manage, a management survey covers materials liable to be disturbed during normal use and routine maintenance, and gives you the register and the material assessment that sit behind your management plan. Before a fit-out, refurbishment or demolition, a refurbishment and demolition survey opens up the affected areas and looks for what is hidden in the fabric.

Both are carried out to HSG264, the HSE’s survey guide. A register is not a document you file once. Known materials need re-inspecting so their condition is tracked, and every fit-out changes the building the register describes. An office register that has not been touched since 2015 has almost certainly been overtaken by two rounds of works.