Managing asbestos roofs across Herefordshire starts with the law
Whoever controls maintenance of a non-domestic building in Herefordshire carries a duty to manage asbestos under Regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012: identify the material, assess its condition, keep a written record and manage the risk. You don’t always need to rip it out. If the asbestos cement is sound, we can seal it, record it and monitor it in place. Encapsulation is just that decision, done properly, inside your management plan.
We treat every Herefordshire asbestos roof as fragile until the survey says otherwise, and the coating or paint system is chosen for the sheets in front of us.
Where asbestos cement roofing sits across Herefordshire
Herefordshire is a livestock and arable county with a food-processing base. Asbestos cement roofs cover poultry units, barns and grain stores across the farming belt, the food and cider-industry works around Hereford, and the town’s industrial estates.
We see a lot of these roofs around Herefordshire. Most were built for a thirty-year life and have long outrun it. That’s why so many are now porous, moss-covered and leaking at the fixings, even where the sheets themselves remain sound.
Encapsulation, repair or removal: the honest choice
Encapsulation seals a sound asbestos cement roof. We don’t just rip it off. First, we’ll do a sheet-by-sheet survey. Then we clean the roof under controlled conditions, sort out any failed fixings and brittle rooflights. Only then do we put down a coating system designed specifically for asbestos cement. It binds the surface, locks the fibres in and gets it shedding water again for years to come. Far less cost and disruption than a full strip-out and re-roof.
When we will tell you to remove instead
Some roofs should not be coated. We’ll tell you straight. We won’t encapsulate if the sheets are badly cracked or holed, if the cement is soft and crumbling after years of water ingress, or if the structure itself has moved. And we only do asbestos cement. Insulation board, lagging or sprayed coating is licensable material. That’s a job for an HSE-licensed remover. If removal is the honest answer, we put that in writing and step aside.
Survey-led across Herefordshire
We survey commercial, industrial, managed and agricultural buildings across the county, including Hereford, Leominster, Ross-on-Wye and Ledbury. The route is the same wherever the building is:
- A condition survey of sheets, fixings, rooflights, gutters and structure
- A photographic record for your asbestos management plan
- A plain written recommendation: encapsulate, repair first, or refer for removal
- A specification and price only where coating is genuinely appropriate
- Work carried out under controlled, documented conditions
If you’ve got a building in your Herefordshire portfolio that dates from the 1960s to the 1980s and the roof has never been assessed, a free asbestos roof encapsulation survey answers the compliance question and the cost question together.
We carry out asbestos roof encapsulation in and around Herefordshire. For the full survey-led service and how we assess each building, see our Asbestos Roof Encapsulation service, or request a free site survey.
Recently — June 2026
We continue to survey every building before recommending a route. Whether to coat, repair or replace is decided on the condition of your roof, not a price list.
Summer is the steadiest season for exterior coating: longer dry spells mean preparation, application and curing can be programmed with fewer weather delays.
