The Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations

The Health & Safety Executive introduced the Control of Asbestos at Work 2002 regulations (CAW 2002) (now Control of Asbestos regulations [CAR] 2006) to help reduce the rising death toll from asbestos related diseases. Around 5000 people per year die from asbestosis, mesothelioma, and asbestos related diseases in the UK. CAW 2002 imposes a number of duties on non-domestic property owners. These include carrying out risk assessments and making asbestos related records available to just about anyone who has reason to view them. The duty to manage introduced in May 2004, as Regulation 4, is to protect the main group of workers suffering from asbestos related diseases. These are maintenance workers and anyone who has the potential to disturb asbestos unknowingly.

Duty to Manage

The HSE rarely miss an opportunity to point out that the new regulation is a duty to manage and not to survey. It is also not a duty to remove! The act of disturbing and removing asbestos is a specialist task to be undertaken by specialised, qualified, contractors. In essence, this is a potentially dangerous task that, if handled badly, can lead to the distribution of the asbestos fibres to anyone and anywhere in the vicinity of the removal, transport route and dump site for the products concerned. There is an additional concern that there is nowhere to put the considerable tonnage of material that is known to have been imported into the UK over the years.

Survey Reports & Paper

Managers of large, extensive, or old estates are likely to drown under a sea of paper reports arriving from asbestos surveying companies every six to twelve months unless they take steps to reduce the focus on paper reporting. Managers of smaller or more modern buildings face a challenge on a reduced scale; they too have duties under CAR 2006 even if they have no asbestos on any of their sites.

Enquiry System for Workers in the Workplace

A key requirement of the regulations is to provide a register of every workplace listing the asbestos items known to exist and key information about each item including a specialist risk assessment. The register needs to be accessible electronically to fit in with the organisations overall requirement for electronic record keeping. This includes web based access by occasional users who will be controlled by sign-on / password access, and given permissioned audited access to summary information.