Asbestos Clearance in Banstead

Banstead grew outward from an old village around the High Street, where a handful of cottages still stand. The bulk of the town came later. Between the wars and through the years after 1945, builders put up detached houses and semis on generous plots, spreading out towards Nork and Burgh Heath, most with their own garage and a decent garden. The North Downs setting and the open commons close by gave the place its character, but it is that housing stock that matters most here.

Asbestos was a standard building material for most of that period. It went into roofs, ceilings, boards, floors and pipework, and the UK did not ban it fully until 1999. So a Banstead house put up in the 1930s, the 1950s or the 1960s was almost certainly built using materials that contained it. Those houses are still standing and still lived in, which means the asbestos has stayed where it was fitted, sitting quietly until someone starts renovating, reroofing or pulling a building apart.

That is the picture across the whole town, not one rare problem in one type of property. It is a common thread running through thousands of ordinary family homes on the same handful of streets. A house near the High Street and a 1960s semi out towards Nork can hold the very same materials, fitted in the very same decades, and the only real difference is whether anyone has gone looking for them yet. None of it is a reason to panic. Left alone and in good condition, most of these materials sit there doing no harm at all. The risk comes when they are cut, drilled, snapped or knocked about during the kind of work that disturbs them, which is exactly when a Banstead homeowner needs to know what they are dealing with before the first tool goes anywhere near it.

A clearance starts with sampling, not with tools on the drive. A small piece of each suspect material is cut out under controlled conditions, double-bagged and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, which confirms within a few working days whether asbestos is present and which type it is. That keeps the cost down at the front end and stops anyone tearing out material that turned out to be harmless. The lab result is the thing that decides what happens next, not a guess on site.

For most non-licensed domestic work, the material is then removed whole rather than smashed up, wrapped or double-bagged and carried away to a licensed disposal facility. There is no skip on most jobs, so the drive and the road outside stay clear, which counts for a lot on the tighter Banstead frontages near the village core. A single garage roof of a dozen or so sheets, or one room of artex, is a one-day job from arrival to clean-up, and the house stays liveable around the work the whole time.

Graham runs these jobs himself out of nearby Chessington, in KT9, a short run down off the Downs. The person who quotes the work is the person who carries it out, so there is one point of contact from the first look on the doorstep to the final clearance. No call centre, no subcontractor turning up on the day you have never spoken to, and a straight answer about what a job involves before anyone agrees to anything.