Source · Select Committees · Education Committee
Recommendation 7
7
Rejected
Commission a national digital register of asbestos in education estate with annual compliance reporting.
Recommendation
We further recommend the Government commission a national digital register of asbestos in the education estate and annual reporting on HSE compliance and asbestos removal achieved through capital programmes. (Recommendation, Paragraph 40) Wider concerns about the condition and maintenance of the school estate
Government Response Summary
The government does not accept the recommendation as it would duplicate existing legal requirements and require significant resource with no clear indicator that asbestos exposure risks would be improved, and could undermine the active requirement on duty holders to manage asbestos.
Government Response
Rejected
HM Government
Rejected
Recommendation: Do not accept The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is continuing its work to deliver on the accepted recommendations of the 2022 Work and Pensions Select Committee report into HSE’s approach to asbestos management. The existing legal requirement set out in the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 requires duty holders to identify and locate asbestos within their premises and share this information with everyone who may possibly, in the course of their work activity, be at risk of exposure to asbestos. This existing information would be duplicated in a new central digital register of asbestos in non-domestic buildings, which would require significant resource from duty holders and government to implement with no clear indicator that asbestos exposure risks would be improved. It could also undermine the active requirement on duty holders to manage asbestos in non-domestic premises on an ongoing basis. However, understanding the size and scale of Great Britain’s asbestos legacy is an important step to developing an asbestos removal strategy and HSE is working to better understand this through the exploration of a census/survey approach, initially focussing on the scale of asbestos in the central Government estate. This will help to provide a more objective and reliable evidence base to inform future decision making and a longer-term strategy for the management and removal of asbestos. DfE will of course support whatever emerges from this and feed in data we hold.