Asbestos is a serious toxin that when disturbed can result in serious or fatal injury from modest levels of exposure. It is 14 years since we authored a report for the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT) ‘As Safe as Houses? Dealing with Asbestos in Social Housing (2009)’ but the issue has come to the fore again in the UK.
Housing repair and maintenance workers on the Wirral (UK) recently took strike action in response to their employers policy requiring them to undertake work on asbestos, without appropriate specialised training, across 13,000 social homes. So, why is this safety issue seemingly still unresolved?
Health risks to workers and residents
It is a serious issue that is also widespread across the country, with recent estimates revealing that asbestos is present in 1.5 million buildings in the UK as well as 90 percent of all public sector housing and that thousands of people die every year in Britain from asbestos-related diseases. Our report shows the risks to the health and wellbeing of itinerant workers, staff, and residents from exposure to asbestos in the home or place of work. Maintenance workers are at significant risk, along with social housing residents when work takes place in their homes.
This is part of a wider problem with social housing in the UK, recently heightened by public and media concern around the condition of social housing stock, particularly around damp and mould. This was highlighted by the untimely death of two year old Awaab Ishak from respiratory conditions created by mould in his social housing home. It prompted us to revisit of the main finding of the ‘As Safe as Houses?’ research, namely that: budgetary calculations around the costs of identifying and removing asbestos influences scientists and government officials (including social housing providers) to adopt a low-risk approach of encapsulation and management of asbestos in-situ which may exacerbate the risk of exposure in people’s homes.
Legislation failures
The research revealed the contradictions within the legislative environment (The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2006) that focuses on requirements for employers and the self-employed to ‘manage’ asbestos in the workplace. Meanwhile social and private landlords have no ’duty to manage’ or maintain a register of asbestos situated within domestic dwellings and no legal obligation to inform residents of asbestos in their homes. Itinerant maintenance workers and residents therefore inadvertently face the risk of exposure to asbestos when undertaking minor repairs and home improvements within domestic dwellings from a lack of information and ignorance of the risks posed.
An Early Day Motioned (Asbestos in Domestic Dwellings EDM 1590) tabled in Parliament in June 2009, and signed by 90 cross-party Members of Parliament, proposed Waldman and Williams recommendations that: the duty to manage asbestos be extended to the internal part of properties and all identified asbestos to be recorded in a register; all power tools to carry a warning to remind users of the potential danger of asbestos and that apprenticeship training courses for construction workers contain modules on asbestos risks and protection procedures; and calls on the Health and safety Executive to review its campaign to raise awareness of asbestos amongst maintenance workers to include some of the report’s recommendations.
Hidden hazards in our houses and society
Fourteen years on, Laurie Kazan- Allen, Coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat reveals in her 2023 update to Britain’s Asbestos Legacy that housing repair and maintenance workers on the Wirral (UK) – who took strike action – were being required to undertake work on asbestos, without appropriate specialised training, across 13,000 social homes. Workers and union representatives were concerned about how to respond to residents’ ‘awkward questions’ as company guidelines do not advise maintenance workers to share with social housing tenants that the work undertaken in their homes involves asbestos.
Asbestos is a hidden hazard in our houses and in our society. How we deal with it, and with mould or the degraded conditions of social housing in the UK, says a lot about the things we value in society. Facilitating the downgrading of asbestos processing, or not dealing with toxicity in social housing is an indictment of our modern lives. We have to value people’s health and make it safe for people to live in their homes above all else, and yet somehow, time and time again, we fail to do so. The true costs of ignoring these toxicities will not be evident for many years to come and we have no doubt that we will come, in due course, to regret this inaction.
