'This is going to be the most serious thing to hit social housing in years'

The countdown on Ken Rashbrooke's computer shows that he has 258 days left. Every morning for the past 10 months Rashbrooke, an asbestos expert at Gallions Housing Association, has been greeted by the realisation that he is one day closer to the introduction of new health and safety rules on asbestos – rules that will cost the social housing sector at least £50m.

On 21 May next year, the Health & Safety Executive will require every property manager in the UK to have a register of the presence of asbestos in its buildings. The HSE estimates that setting up this register will cost an initial £5bn; according to the ODPM, social housing's share of this is expected to hit £50m by 2009. Gallions, for example, is facing a bill of about £250,000 across 6500 homes if it is to meet the deadline. The penalty for failing to do so is potentially huge: fines of up to £20,000 will be imposed for each offence. And all this is on top of the hundreds of thousands of pounds councils are being forced to spend on removing the deadly substance as they refurbish homes to meet the decent homes standard.

The hidden cost
Asbestos is estimated to be present in about 90% of all public sector housing, but councils and housing associations are largely unaware of the deadline and its implications. Rashbrooke says: "The full impact of having to meet this deadline has yet to hit home. People think that they are exempt from the new regulations but they are not. By a combination of the Defective Premises Act 1972, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the new act, nobody is free from having to do this – it will touch everyone. This is going to be the most serious thing to hit social housing in years."

The survey will cost this much simply because of its thoroughness; just sampling stock is not enough. Every home needs to be included, in detail. "The sums involved in meeting this deadline are going to scare the wits out of people in the sector," Rashbrooke says. "If you want any accuracy – and the HSE will demand it – you are going to have to pay. The asbestos register and 21 May is going to have a very huge and, in the main, unforeseen impact.

"People have to wise up to this and fast. If they don't, apart from the fines, they will lay themselves open to all sorts of litigation from tenants and contractors."

The register is a requirement under the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002. The idea is to assess whether there is any asbestos in the premises and, depending on the condition of the asbestos, to decide whether it should be removed or managed so that subsequent maintenance activities do not expose workers to avoidable risk. Most asbestos is not dangerous unless it is disturbed, in which case the dust can cause major respiratory problems including lung cancer – about 3000 people die every year from diseases brought on by previous exposure to asbestos, so the register is a way of making sure housing providers can give information on the location and the condition of asbestos to anyone who is likely to disturb it.

The regulations stipulate that they do not relate to "non-domestic" properties, but social landlords are collared by the section relating to "common parts of premises including housing developments and blocks of flats". According to the HSE, this includes "foyers, corridors, lifts and lift shafts, staircases, boiler houses, vertical risers,    gardens, yards and outhouses" – in other words, much social housing (see "What is asbestos?").

We’ve set aside £120,000 a year to deal with asbestos but this is nowhere near enough

Alan Drake, Poole council

Ross Udall, director at asbestos consultant Particle Analysis, has 20 years' experience surveying and dealing with asbestos. He says: "Water tanks, Artex coatings on the ceiling, asbestos insulation board in electricity cupboards, under staircases, service ducts, heating ducts – all these are very common in large municipal blocks from the 1960s and 1970s."

But it gets worse: the HSE also expects to extend what is called "the duty to manage" to all housing in the near future, meaning that even the homes not currently affected by the 21 May deadline are likely to need to be registered.

Councils and associations should be very afraid, says Rashbrooke, as the HSE will take its responsibility for enforcing the regulations very seriously indeed. "If the HSE does not find appropriate registers when it investigates – and in this sector, it is more than likely that it will not – there will be a lot of fines and in some bad cases, prison sentences. The HSE can charge up to £20,000 for an individual offence."

The refurbishment issue
All this couldn't come at a worse time for Alan Drake, a property inspector at Poole council in Dorset. Like most social housing providers refurbishing homes to get them up to the decent homes standard by 2010, Poole council is having to face up to the cost of dealing with the asbestos in many of those homes. Although the presence of asbestos in a home doesn't automatically make it non-decent, it does mean that during refurbishment, any asbestos likely to be disturbed has to be removed by a specialist contractor.

"The vast majority of Poole's properties have evidence of asbestos," says Drake. "The HSE wants us to manage the problem rather than removing the asbestos. If we want to install central heating we have to get a licensed contractor in to carry out the job." This costs extra money – it can double the price of straightforward jobs.

"We have set aside £120,000 each year to deal with asbestos but this is nowhere near enough. We do have some high-risk asbestos such as heating insulation that it is very expensive to deal with; high-risk floor tiles and Artex paint are also expensive areas.

Many landlords have no idea of the extent of asbestos in their properties 

Ross Udall, Asbestos consultant

"In meeting the decent homes standard we will encounter jobs that will mean we have no choice but to disturb asbestos. It costs £1500-2000 to fit a kitchen; if there is an asbestos issue this can add £500-£600 to this cost. If you multiply this across the 1800 homes we need to bring up to the standard then you get a sense of the enormous extra cost this represents.

"There is an awful lot of ignorance around about this problem. A number of councils are turning a blind eye to it because they don't want to grasp the nettle."

Gallions Housing Association and Greenwich council both face similar problems. Gallions' Rashbrooke says: "We have four blocks just now that we have earmarked for refurbishment or demolition. Before either process can proceed, it will cost us £2m to remove the asbestos in the 380 homes and make them safe for contractors to work in.

"The big question is whether or not work can be done without disturbing asbestos. In most cases, if you are refurbishing typical kitchens and bathrooms, you would be looking at easily £2000 extra per property if asbestos were present. It is that hard to avoid disturbing it."

A source within Greenwich council, who did not want to be named, says: "We know all about asbestos as we've got so much of the damn stuff: places like Greenwich were simply flattened during the Second World War, so when they were rebuilt afterwards they were riddled with asbestos as it was so popular then. New kitchens and bathrooms are a huge issue for us."

Asbestos consultant Ross Udall adds: "You can say with a high degree of confidence that about 90% of social housing has asbestos present in an area that could be disturbed under a general refurbishment – there is literally tonnes of this stuff in public sector housing. In many cases landlords have no idea of the extent of asbestos in their properties."

You're on your own
An ODPM spokeswoman says: "There is no question of exempting local authorities from the duty to manage as the Health & Safety Commission cannot justify refusing to protect all workers equally. The ODPM expects local authorities to take all relevant factors into account when drawing up business plans and undertaking options appraisals."

Indeed, this huge task should come as no surprise to the sector. The HSE has been conducting a campaign to raise awareness of the issue since November 2002. Speaking at a publicity event in February, Nick Brown, then health and safety minister at the Department of Work and Pensions, said:

"The new risk is in the construction sector, the risk to workers who are working on buildings that were built at a time when the use of asbestos was commonplace. Those who work in these buildings – plumbers, electricians, other maintenance workers – often don't know that they're at risk from disturbing the material. They don't know if their work is going to affect other users of the building and perhaps put them at risk."

No one is debating the importance of protecting construction workers from the potentially fatal effects of asbestos, but as Rashbrooke says: "The duty to manage asbestos is going to be massive. The biggest problem is conducting the survey. It cannot be done on a generic sample basis as asbestos was used almost anywhere – in the walls, ceilings and floors.

"Until it was found to be a carcinogen, asbestos was the perfect construction product – light, adaptable and it retained heat – so it was used everywhere throughout the 1950s and 1960s.