Shelved survey costs council

Prosecutions and Claims |
15.09.2007

Wear Valley District Council has been ordered to pay a total of £25,722 for exposing staff at its leisure centres to asbestos with no warning or protection for more than five years.

Maintenance workers alerted the HSE to unmanaged asbestos at the council's Woodhouse Close leisure centre in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in January last year, after a routine enquiry from an assessor for a quality award revealed a five-year- old survey by the council that showed high levels of exposed asbestos in the centre's plant room.

HSE inspector Richard Bishop said Wear Valley's facilities manager had commissioned the asbestos survey of all the authority's public buildings in 2001 to comply with the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002.

"They found quite a bit of asbestos-containing material in the plant room at Woodhouse Close. It was typical stuff like pipe lagging, gasket seals, cloth insulation and so on," said Bishop, adding that some of the material was noted as being in poor condition, though none was recommended for immediate removal.

Instead of using the survey as the spur for a monitoring and control regime, Bishop said council staff "put it on a shelf in the civic centre" and ignored it until the assessor for the Quest quality mark for leisure facilities asked for any relevant reports and received a copy.

"The assessor sat down with the manager and said 'by the way do you know you've got asbestos here' and the manager's ears pricked up," said Bishop, "and he shared the report with the staff."

Two maintenance workers based at the centre and various contractors had been working routinely with the hazardous material, including cutting rolls of asbestos to make new gasket seals, with no idea they were at risk.

"When they were working with the asbestos they would have got it on their clothes; they would have taken it home," Bishop noted. Specialist inspections confirmed the asbestos had spread inside and outside the plant room.

At Darlington Magistrates' Court on 23 August, Wear Valley District Council pleaded guilty to six charges under the 2002 Regulations (since replaced by the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2006). The charges covered the authority's failure to manage the asbestos and, specifically, to monitor its condition; to have a written plan to reduce the risk; to inform and train employees exposed to it; and to control its spread.

The council was fined £18,000 plus HSE costs of £7,722. Bishop noted that the charges were effectively sample charges, as the 2001 survey had highlighted asbestos in other council buildings that had also been neglected since. "There were lots of failings with this one, unfortunately," he noted.