As I am sure you are aware these regulations were hastily driven through parliament in February/March 2012 in order for them be in force from 1st April 2012. Why so fast, without, IMHO, sufficient consultation? So fast that very little was publicised in the professional literature (SHP magazine ran a quarter page article on the 'proposed consultation' in Oct2011 issue, half way through the consultation process) and the ACoP and associated literature is still being updated. Well, CAR2006 did not meet the standards expected in the Asbestos Workers Protection Directive so amendments were needed. We have now hit 4700 deaths a year in the UK; a figure that I understood would not be reached for a few more decades.

For those of you that missed the SHP article, and I suspect it was quite a few, the changes to the regulations are significant in spite of what the HSE would have us believe. To summarise:
- Some non-licensed work is now notifiable to the enforcing authorities making it effectively licensed work in all but name. It will be known as Notifiable Non-licensed Work (NNLW).
- Written records have to be kept of this NNLW, including the who, where and when as well as an estimate of exposure, though the legislators have not made airborne exposure monitoring mandatory for every NNLW job. These health surveillance records must be kept for at least 40 years.
- From April 2015, anyone doing NNLW will have to be included in health surveillance through their GP.
- The HSE have introduced a new 10-minute control limit for 'low risk asbestos work of a sporadic or low intensity nature' that sits alongside the current 0.1fibres/ml limit averaged over 4hours.

By the way, 0.1 fibres/ml is the same as 100,000 fibres per cubic metre of air. For a typical office with the dimensions 5mx4mx3m, that equates to 8 million fibres in the room for it to pass the clearance test so long as those involved can show that fibre levels are as low as reasonably practicable below the limit. That is why the HSE stress the control limits are NOT safety limits. Trivial, insignificant exposure has resulted in many cases of mesothelioma so effectively any exposure is hazardous.

So what's my take on it? Well, I carry out asbestos awareness courses so I guess I will have lots more of them to do in the future. However, as with all rushed, hastily drafted legislation I am sure there are going to be real problems.

Will the new regulations be effective? I have my doubts and here are some of the reasons why.

Firstly, Licensed contractors were created to ensure cowboy contractors had less room to operate and so we are all better protected. They are generally well managed by the authorities and are skilled at their work. Non-licensed activities are where the real problems lie. We've known this since the early 90's. Making the bureaucratic burden greater for non-licensed asbestos workers (which pretty much includes everyone in construction, telecomms, IT installation, gas fitting, demolition, etc) will discourage compliance rather than encourage it. If some of these non-licensed activities are now regarded as a higher risk, thereby warranting notification, then surely they should have been made Licensed work and not left as non-licensed.

Secondly, by introducing the additional short term airborne concentration of 0.6 fibres/ml averaged over 10 minutes effectively water down the control limit for no epidemiologically justifiable reason and for the very people, who will probably avoid notification, but who need better protection. Indeed, the 0.1 fibre/ml limit has no real health basis but has more to do with the limitations of the recommended method for sampling and analysis of airborne fibre concentrations. That is why it is not a safe limit. It's probably true that there is no safe limit so we are stuck with what we have at the moment. However, that does not mean we should allow millions of people to be exposed to a 600% higher level of fibres even if it is for a short 10 minute period. The risk of mesothelioma may well not be dose related and so this higher limit surely encourages greater exposure. I have trawled the regs and cannot find where the 0.6fibre/ml over 10 mins is quoted so I am unsure if it has any legal basis. Furthermore the consultative document did not even mention this new limit but still it has been introduced. The ACoP may give some answers if and when it is eventually updated but at the moment the whole issue is woefully inadequate.

Thirdly, keeping records for 40 years is a big undertaking. Many small employers will not be resourced for this level of archiving. Plus the information will all be medical in confidence to which the usual personnel record security does not legally extend. This will be a real headache for SME's and potentially very costly.

Finally, regulations should be as simple as possible and therefore easy to understand and implement. Many changes made in the 2006 regs and the associated material, such as Asbestos Essentials series, have been excellent. The flow chart to determine whether a job should be licencsed or not was a good idea. The new flowchart is more complicated, convoluted and confusing; it looks like 'spaghetti junction on crack' as one of my course delegates put it. The additional requirements are not necessarily a bad thing per se but they do create more complexity and so may well result in poor adoption by the ordinary trades people they are there to protect.

Could this have been avoided? Yes, I think it could. The 9 week consultation only received 131 responses though the HSE points out that this is fit for purpose. I would not say that it was a representative sample. How many of the 131 respondent's have a clue about Asbestos? Does it matter? I believe it does. Only 5 medical professionals responded, and who knows if they are GP's, oncologists, cardiothoracic experts, nurses or physiotherapists? Certainly not the HSE. I am not confident that the quantity nor the quality of response is adequate but who am I to criticise? I didn't respond myself because I had no idea the consultation was taking place. One may suggest that this was professional tardiness on my part but like most professionals I do not expect legislation of this importance to be slipped on to the statute books under the radar. Our coalition government is partly to blame as they have had neither the inclination nor the political will to increase the so called burden of H&S on businesses and anything from Europe is a difficult one for No10 to deal with. The HSC/HSE have been somewhat complicit as they should have stood their ground and insisted that they take a longer consultation. I suspect with political axes out they were reluctant to create enemies at Whitehall.

Your thoughts would be welcome.

With the greatest respect, in the context of analytical methodology, that statement is utter nonsense. I trust you do not make such statements during your awareness training.
I suggest a read of MDHS39/4.

I too was disappointed at the level of response to the CD ( I was one such), but then the HSE were working to a tight timescale to correct UK legislation to align with the parent Directive before penalties were imposed.
It is an unfortunate outcome of interpretation of the Directive that wet stripping of textured coatings is now classified as a higher risk in the new NNLW category.

Bibby

You are clearly have a great deal of angst such that you seem to have forgotten the clearance figure is 0.01 f/ml. A self reminder of page 26 onward in HSG 248 is required.

I actually really like reg 2(3)b where the work cannot be short duration for an operative if the work period for him/her personally exceeds a total of 1 hour in any 7 day period - you should of course ensure that this is understood when training especially managers and operatives. Especially where an employees work is regularly encountering ACMs. Problem is of course even this figure can give rise to unneccessarily high exposures. It might restrict the use of some of these Non Licensed Asbestos Teams beloved by some contractors.

The real question is "do we expose a smaller number to a slightly higher risk or whether we leave a larger number of operatives facing the same level of risk?" Its a no brainer and the tighter the control in declaring non notifiable work is for me personally a MUST. The HSE certainly messed up the regulations!

Ron

I am non too sure of your comment re textured coatings - the ability to assess potential fibre level still exists

Bob

Bob, I can only see Bibby mention the Control Limit, not the Clearance Indicator?

I was one of the 131 and my response was not favourable, not that it did much good. The regs were rushed - partly the fault of EU processes, but mainly due to HSE not getting it right in the first place. The maths is an interesting discussion for those who don't realise that there's no such thing as a an identifiable safe limit, but my greatest concern is this talk of 'non-friable AIB' and the work that HSE will allow non-licensed contractors to carry out. Huge continuing cumulative exposures await.

Take for example the guidance in Asbestos Essentials sheet A0. I have 0.5m of crocidolite/amosite insulated dead-end pipework in one of our plantrooms, encapsulated and in good condition. To follow the flowchart:

'Is it in good condition?' Yes.

'Will the work involve working more than 1 hour a week?' No, you could hacksaw through the thing in about 10 minutes.

Ooh good, the work is non-licensed! But is it still notifiable?

'Is the work removal?' Yes.

'Is the material highly friable and likely to deteriorate when worked on?' Oh yes!

Well then it is notifiable, but you don't have to notify days in advance, so I'll shoot HSE an email while the engineer's getting the saw out of his bag.

Now you can say I'm taking that info out of context, but we are moving from a place where certain materials were the reserve of specialist contractors to a state which can be interpreted as 'you can do any work you like so long as you hurry' (1 hour will be treated more as a target than a limit).

Other gems include allowing non-specialist contractors to remove nailed AIB so long as you do it without breaking it (Good luck with that, even if you do the fibre release is potentially huge, locally) and the whole thing is a recipe for disaster.

Cynically yours....

You are dead right Bob I do have a good deal of angst about the subject. With the annual mortality rate of all asbestos associated deaths currently at 4700 and rising a bit more angst all round wouldn't go amiss.

I wholeheartedly agree with your point and reasoning behind notification of more activities i.e the non-licensed work but I'm just not confident it will be achieved to the level we would wish. Just look at the effort that the HSE puts in with the Licensed contractors. If they stopped turning up during licensed removal work how long would it be before standards slip? I suspect not long. NNLW may suffer from severe under-reporting, but only time will tell. Like you say Bob they have certainly messed up the regs, the question is will it cost lives?

BTW I hadn't forgotten the clearance figure of 0.01f/ml, I simply thought I had written lots anyway and going too deep, especially for people who may not understand the subject, would be confusing.

For those who aren't familiar with the term, the Clearance Indicator is the effective limit of quantification of the analytical method. By that I mean the lowest fibre count that we can (legally) have confidence in the results. The reason this lower figure is not quoted in the regs is because it may be very difficult to achieve without extraordinary and, some would argue, unreasonable effort. In effect many 'cleared' rooms would risk becoming unusable because the cost of continual cleaning has its limits. The clearance indicator does gives something to aim at when applying the ALARP principle, which is what matters in law.

Don't get me wrong I have no criticism per se of the method. It has been developed and been subject to scrutiny over many decades and though it isn't perfect it is as good as we've got. Notwithstanding the attempts to automate the counting process, which 25 years ago (I'm giving my age away!) was considered less effective than human counting.

Ron,
Thanks for your response but I'm still not sure what you mean. My understanding of the science is that the method, whether applied to static monitoring or personal exposure, is indeed attempting to quantify fibre concentrations in the whole space, so surely scaling is not invalid. It may be impractical and unconventional but all exposure limits are scalable to the real world, isn't that why we use them?

Regarding the maths;

0.1f/ml = 1f/10ml = 100f/L = 100,000 f/m3 = 10,000,000f/100m3.

They are all the same ratio, just expressed in different ways. Is that not right?

Obviously the random distribution of fibres throughout a space may well be uneven and result in variations in concentration, which is why personal exposure monitoring is so important during an activity, but with static monitoring the assumption is that distribution is more even throughout the space, having cleaned up the hot spots, and so scalability is entirely valid.

If sampling only collected a few ml's of air I would take your point about scalability but we aren't, we are talking about large volumes of sampled air (and many cubic metres in a room) so scalability is valid.

BTW I didn't raise the reference periods (4hr, 8hr, 10mins, etc) and flowrates (1l/min, 2L/min, 4L/min, etc) as they are primarily used to ensure sufficient volume of air is sampled (i.e. a representative sample of the air in the space over time) and sufficient fibres are deposited to be counted precisely, without overloading the filter, which tends to cause under-counting. The clearance indicator, which is equivalent to 10 fibres/litre, is the lower limit of quantification that we can legally have confidence in and is still a long way from zero fibres, when even 'one' may cause mesothelioma.

Rgds, Bibs