Asbestos survey cost

Survey type sets the figure before anything else

HSG264 splits surveys in two, and the split accounts for most of the price gap people ring me about. A management survey covers a building carrying on in normal occupation. I walk it, I look at what is reachable, I sample what needs sampling, and where a material is inaccessible I am allowed to presume it contains asbestos and record it as such. A refurbishment and demolition survey does not permit that comfort. If the fabric is going to be opened up, someone has to open it first: floors lifted, ceilings broken through, risers stripped, boxing cut, plant casings pulled off, then made good afterwards. That is destructive work with reinstatement time attached, so it costs more, and it should.

The two are not alternatives and the cheaper one is not a saving. A management survey on a 1972 office you are about to strip out is worth nothing to the contractor on day one, because it never looked inside the columns where the sprayed coating is.

The building decides the hours, not the floor area

Square metres are the worst predictor of survey time I know. What I am counting when I price a job is rooms, thresholds, voids, risers, plant spaces and outbuildings, and above all the age and the alterations.

A 1930s semi with an intact original layout is quick. A 1968 system-built school block is not: asbestos insulating board to the soffits, the boiler cupboard linings and the fire breaks above the corridor ceiling, sprayed coating to the steel frame, rope gaskets and pipe lagging in the plant room, bitumen-backed floor tiles under three later coverings, cement sheet to the boiler house roof, and textured coating on ceilings that could date from any year up to the 1999 chrysotile ban. Every one of those is a different product, a different sample, a different access problem. Amosite and crocidolite came out of use after the 1985 ban, but they are still sitting in the buildings that had them, and a 1970s building will hand you all of it in one morning.

Then there are the alterations. Buildings that have been refitted three times are the expensive ones, because the survey has to work out what each generation left behind. I have found AIB panels boxed inside stud work put up in the 1990s by someone who had no idea what they were covering.

Access is where the day gets long

The single thing most likely to push a survey over its allotted time is the door nobody has a key for. Locked plant rooms, tenanted flats with no notice given, a riser with a stored pallet in front of it, a loft hatch painted shut since the 1980s, a roof void that needs a tower rather than a ladder. Every one of those either adds an hour or forces a return visit, and a return visit is a second mobilisation.

Under CAR 2012 the dutyholder is expected to give the surveyor the information and the access needed for the survey to do its job, and HSG264 is clear that a survey carried out around obstructions carries caveats that reduce its value. If a building is occupied and cannot be cleared, say so at the outset. It changes how the work is planned, and it is far cheaper than discovering it at nine in the morning with a surveyor standing in the car park.

Samples, and the laboratory behind them

Looking at a material tells you what to suspect. It does not tell you what is in it. Textured coating and modern gypsum plasterboard skim can look identical under a coat of emulsion, and cement sheet from 1975 and fibre cement from 2005 are near indistinguishable at arm’s length. The only way to know is a sample analysed by a laboratory holding UKAS accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 for asbestos identification.

Sample count is where quotations diverge quietly. Many are written with a fixed number included and everything beyond it charged per sample. On a building with six distinct eras of work in it, a bundle of ten will not survive contact with the site. Ask what happens on sample eleven before you agree the fee, not afterwards. HSE guidance points clients towards inspection bodies accredited to ISO/IEC 17020 for the surveying itself, and the accreditation should cover the work being offered rather than sitting on a letterhead.

Travel, revisits and what lands on your desk

Distance and mobilisation are real costs and honest quotations show them. So is the report. A survey report under HSG264 is not a certificate, it is a working document: material assessments, a plan or photographs showing where each item is, a clear record of what was inspected, and an explicit statement of what was not reached and why. Producing that properly takes desk time, roughly comparable to the site time on a complex building. If a client wants the findings dropped into their own register format or a CAD layer, that is more time again.

When a figure looks low

A low price is almost never generosity. It is nearly always a narrower scope: fewer areas, fewer samples, more presumption, a smaller report, or a management survey quietly offered where a refurbishment survey was needed. Presumption is legitimate and HSG264 allows it, but every presumed item is a decision deferred, and it will come back as a delay when the contractor stops work. The question worth asking is not what the number is. It is what was left out to get there, and who pays for it later.