July 29th 2019

[H] Today we received our asbestos survey report and we do have asbestos in the house, which is annoying but not really surprising as apparently most UK houses built pre-1999 have some asbestos in them somewhere. So what made us have an asbestos survey done I hear you ask? Well, once we’d got planning permission we had assumed that we could crack on and start demolishing the existing house. However it transpires that planning permission which includes demolition as part of the application does not actually give you permission to proceed with demolition! We had to submit a Notice of Demolition to the local authority (and pay another fee!) and we were then issued with a set of requirements that we must adhere to, which includes things like not burning any material on site without permission from the Council, having an asbestos survey done and, if any is found, it must be removed by a specialist contractor. So in order to comply with the law and avoid a hefty fine we had to arrange an asbestos survey (and pay yet another fee!). Our asbestos is now recorded on a national register and we need to engage a licensed contractor to have it removed and properly disposed of (which will obviously cost quite a lot and is something we hadn't budgeted for as, being new to all this, it never occurred to us that we might have to deal with asbestos).