Qualifications

There is presently no qualification required to call yourself an asbestos surveyor, many so called surveyors have no education or qualifications relating to building construction. Most of the "Asbestos surveyors" have only passed a two day course and filled in profoma survey reports.

The accepted standard for carrying out asbestos surveys is currently the P402 proficiency Certificate in Building Surveys and Bulk Sampling for Asbestos issued by the British Occupational Hygiene Society. All our surveyors hold this qualification however we recognise that it has it's limitations as it does not teach anything about building construction, building regulations, fire regulations or how to survey the many different types of buildings we have in the UK. We believe that without surveying experience the qualification alone is inadequate to carryout competent asbestos surveys.

As Chartered Surveyors we have over twenty years of surveying experience, we understand property construction, together with the regulations and laws surrounding it.

We are aware of where asbestos could have been used in the construction and alterations. We have experience of surveying a wide range of buildings for asbestos from corner shops to international airports. We provide a professional service which is balanced and independent backed by years of surveying experience. We also have professional indemnity insurance as required by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

The cost of inexperience

Many companies appear to charge low fees for asbestos surveys, there are reasons why a cheap survey may cost you more than you expect.

Some companies charge for samples which are unnecessary and inflate the total cost of the survey. We have seen this on a number of occasions where either inexperienced or incompetent surveyors have taken samples from materials which we could instantly identify as being non-asbestos.

On one occasion we are aware of a surveyor sampled both ends of a number of window sills increasing the cost of samples by hundreds of pounds.

Some companies are asbestos removal contractors and can recommend unnecessary and very expensive removal of asbestos which could cost you thousands of pounds.

The value of UKAS

Much is made by some asbestos surveying companies that they have UKAS accreditation, they hold this out as an indication of their competence. However it is not always an indication competence of the individual surveyor as we have witnessed recently.

UKAS is a quality assurance accreditation, it means that a firm operating under a UKAS accreditation is supposed to produce work of the same quality every time, what it does not mean is that the work is of a high quality - just the same quality.