Asbestos survey and fire risk assessment package from £249

The person who has to hold a fire risk assessment is usually the same person who has to manage asbestos. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the responsible person must assess fire risk in the non-domestic parts of a building and record the significant findings. Under Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 the dutyholder for the common parts of the same building must find out whether asbestos-containing materials are present, record where they are and their condition, assess the risk and maintain a written management plan. Both duties apply to the communal areas of a block of flats, to an HMO, to an office, a shop, a warehouse or a care home. Both are usually asked for by the same people — a lender, an insurer, a council enforcement officer, a buyer's solicitor — and usually asked for at the same time. Doing them as one job is simply how the work should have been organised in the first place.

The fire side is a full assessment carried out to the British Standards PAS 79 methodology by an IFSM-registered assessor: escape routes, compartmentation, fire doors, alarm and detection, emergency lighting, signage, management arrangements and a prioritised action plan with photographs. The asbestos side is a management survey of the areas you are responsible for, with presumed and sampled materials, a material assessment scoring each item, a photographic register, plans marking locations and a written management plan you can hand to contractors. Where the building is being refurbished or partly demolished we quote a refurbishment and demolition survey instead, because a management survey is not adequate for intrusive work — we will tell you which you need before you book, not after.

We book one attendance. The fire assessor and the asbestos surveyor arrive together, sign in once, and split the building between them, coming back together for the risers, roof voids, plant rooms and service cupboards where both disciplines have an interest. On a communal area of a typical London block the pair are on site for two to three hours. Larger or more complex premises take longer, and occasionally — a large estate, a live commercial floor, restricted access to a plant room — the surveys have to run on separate days. We will say so when we quote rather than discovering it on the day. Sampling is bagged and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory the same day; the fire report is with you within 24 hours of the visit, and the asbestos report follows as soon as the analysis returns, usually within two to three working days.

This is the part most buyers do not expect. A fire risk assessment routinely produces remedial work: upgrading a compartment wall, fitting a new fire door, sealing a penetration around a service pipe, boxing in a riser. Every one of those jobs involves cutting into fabric. If nobody knows whether that fabric contains asbestos, one of two things happens — the work stalls while a survey is arranged, or a contractor disturbs an asbestos insulating board ceiling and turns a £400 job into a very expensive incident with a legal dimension. When both surveys are done in the same week by the same firm, the fire action plan is written with the asbestos register open, and each remedial item carries a note where asbestos is presumed or confirmed nearby. Nothing stalls. Nothing gets disturbed by accident.

In pre-2000 London blocks the recurring asbestos items are textured coatings on communal ceilings, asbestos insulating board in riser and meter cupboards, bitumen damp-proof course, cement soffits and flue pipes, and floor tiles under later coverings. None of these are dangerous while sealed and undisturbed — the risk is a contractor drilling into them without a register to check. On the fire side the recurring items are the same ones we see everywhere: fire doors without functioning self-closers, wedged-open cross-corridor doors, penetrations around cabling into protected shafts, storage in escape routes and out-of-date or absent testing records. Both lists are usually cheap to close out. What costs money is finding out about them from an enforcement notice.

The package starts at £249 for a small building — a single communal area, a small HMO, a modest commercial unit — and is priced by the size of the building, the number of communal areas and how much sampling the asbestos survey requires. Laboratory analysis is included in the figure we quote; we do not add it afterwards. The package rate is always below the sum of the two services bought separately, because one journey, one set-up and one reporting cycle covers both. If you have several properties, the per-property rate falls again and every building lands on one renewal calendar. Call 020 3951 4856 with the address and the rough floor area and you will have a fixed price the same day.