By Asbestos removal a ’40-year deadline’ says MPs
According to reports, MPs have called for a 40-year deadline for all asbestos to be removed from public and commercial businesses.
The Work and Pensions committee said asbestos remained the biggest cause of work-related deaths in the UK.
According to reports, over 5,000 such fatalities were recorded in 2019.
From the BBC, HSE suggests that asbestos may still be present in 300,000 non-domestic buildings and many more homes.
There is currently no target date for the eradication of the material in public buildings, or private homes, in the UK.
Asbestos is labelled as carcinogenic, which means it can cause cancer and other dangerous lung conditions when fibres are inhaled and usage was banned in the UK in 1999.
The committee warned that the risks were likely to escalate as ‘the retrofitting of buildings to meet net-zero requirements meant more materials containing asbestos would be disturbed in the coming decades’ the MPs said.
The committee said neither HSE nor the Government, had put forward a “clear and comprehensive strategy” for achieving this.
The committee says a “clear deadline” would help to “focus minds”.
“Simple reliance on a set of regulations which devolve asbestos management to individual duty holders – the building owners or managers responsible for maintenance – will not be good enough,” the committee said.
“We need a pan-government and ‘system-wide’ strategy for the long-term removal of asbestos, founded on strong evidence of what is best from a scientific, epidemiological, and behavioural point of view.”
