The duty to manage asbestos in older buildings

Asbestos is not a historical problem. It is the single biggest cause of work-related death in Great Britain, with more than 5,000 deaths a year attributable to asbestos-related diseases, including 2,218 mesothelioma deaths recorded in 2023 (HSE, Asbestos-related disease statistics, Great Britain, 2025). The exposures behind those deaths often happened decades ago, but the material is still in the buildings around us, and the law that governs it applies today.

If your portfolio includes anything built or refurbished before 2000, you almost certainly have asbestos somewhere in it, and you almost certainly have a legal duty to manage it.

What the duty actually is

Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 sets out the duty to manage asbestos in non-domestic premises. It falls on whoever has responsibility for the maintenance or repair of the premises, often through a tenancy agreement or contract. For blocks of flats it reaches the common parts, the stairwells, lift shafts, plant rooms, roof spaces and risers, even where the flats themselves are domestic.

The duty is not to remove asbestos. Well-maintained asbestos that is left undisturbed is usually safer in place than disturbed by unnecessary work. The duty is to know where it is, keep it in good condition, and make sure nobody disturbs it unknowingly. In practice that breaks down into a short, repeatable set of obligations.

The five things the dutyholder has to do

• Find out whether asbestos is present. Take reasonable steps to identify materials that contain it, their location and their condition. Anything in a pre-2000 building is presumed to contain asbestos unless there is strong evidence otherwise.
• Record what you find. Keep an up-to-date asbestos register: what the material is, where it is, and what condition it is in.
• Assess and manage the risk. Judge the likelihood of disturbance and prioritise accordingly.
• Write a management plan. Set out how the risk will be managed, who is responsible, and the schedule of re-inspection.
• Tell the people who need to know. Anyone liable to disturb the material, from a contractor drilling a wall to a maintenance engineer in a riser, must have the information before the work starts.

The thread running through all five is the same one that runs through every other compliance duty: a record that is current, owned and in front of the right person at the right moment.

Where it goes wrong

Asbestos management rarely fails because a register was never made. It fails because the register was made once, filed, and never looked at again. A survey from 2014 sitting in a drawer is not a live record of condition. The material degrades, refurbishments move walls, and the people who knew where the survey lived have moved on.

The other common failure is the disconnect between the register and the work. A contractor arrives to chase a cable into a ceiling void, nobody checks the register, and the first anyone hears of the asbestos insulating board is when it is already disturbed. The information existed. It just was not where the spade went in, a problem we have written about before in the context of buried services and what lies beneath a site.

Keeping it live

A useful asbestos record has three properties. It is current, so the condition reflects the last inspection, not the original survey. It is owned, so re-inspection has a named person and a due date rather than being everyone's vague responsibility. And it is reachable at the point of work, so a permit to do anything intrusive surfaces the relevant entry before, not after.

That is the same shape as a good compliance calendar and a good document register: the law asks for evidence, but the evidence only protects anyone if it is maintained between the moments it is needed. SAMRISK keeps the asbestos register against the building it belongs to, ties re-inspection to dated, owned actions, and puts the record in front of the person about to start work, so the duty to manage is something the building actually carries rather than something that lapsed quietly in a filing cabinet.

The deaths in this year's figures trace back to exposures that were avoidable. The ones in twenty years' figures are still being decided by how well today's buildings are managed.