A surge in the amount of refurbishment work in schools has brought an old foe back into the spotlight, says Bob Towse, head of technical and safety at the HVCA.
Schools have proved to be one of the most lucrative sectors for m&e engineers during the economic slowdown thanks to increased spending through the Building Schools for the Future programme and local authority budgets.

The relative prosperity of this market is highlighted elsewhere in the Top of the Class HVR supplement.

However, the ambitious programme of rebuilding and refurbishing school buildings up and down the country has raised the spectre of one of our old problems: asbestos.

Long ago it was known as the 'miracle mineral' before it became apparent that there was another side to this material, and the problems caused by asbestos simply refuse to go away.

As a number of HVCA members have pointed out to us, it is a particular hazard in old school buildings. Maidstone-based DSL, which manages a very large number of school buildings and is profiled in the Schools Supplement, says it comes across asbestos in some shape or other almost every day.

With the amount of work that has to be carried out to improve school buildings, we are once again encountering asbestos regularly. Teachers and parents are understandably worried about the potential harm to children if the risk is not managed sensibly and local authorities are coming down hard on contractors who do not carry out proper risk assessments before starting work.

Danger

A number of reports have reached us of contractors being sacked by public sector clients for missing the asbestos threat.

That might seem harsh but asbestos remains a clear and present danger - we are very far from consigning this problem to the past.

More than 2,000 people die every year from mesothelioma - the cancer caused by exposure to asbestos fibres - and industry estimates suggest the number of deaths from historic exposure will not peak until 2015.

The HSE estimates that as many as 1.8 million workers, from a wide variety of professions, still come into contact with asbestos during their routine daily work.
Employers in our sector have taken a largely responsible attitude and m&e firms do have a good reputation, as a whole, for carrying out risk assessments and giving training to ensure that today's workers do not face anything like the same risks as those faced by their predecessors in the '50s, '60s and '70s. These same rigorous standards apply to any members of the public who might be put at risk by our work- and particularly school children.

We continue to promote the Approved Code of Practice (ACoP) for asbestos, which has been part of Health and Safety legislation for three years now. This gives clear guidance about who could be exposed and what training they will require. However, we cannot be complacent and we cannot ignore the potential threat to occupants of the buildings in which we work.

The fact that the issue is still very much a factor in schools makes it of even greater importance that we treat this issue with as much seriousness as ever and carry out those risk assessments.