A familiar roof on Greater Manchester’s trading estates
Drive past almost any post-war industrial estate around Manchester and you will see it: grey corrugated sheeting, often streaked with moss and algae, covering units built between the 1960s and the 1980s. A great deal of that sheeting is asbestos cement. It has done decades of service in a wet North West climate, and many of those roofs are now at the point where owners have to decide what happens next.
The two realistic options are removal with full re-roofing, or encapsulation: cleaning, repairing and sealing the existing sheets under a coating system built for asbestos cement. Which one is right depends entirely on the condition of the roof, which is why we survey before we recommend anything.
Encapsulation explained: sealing, not stripping
Asbestos cement is only hazardous when fibres can escape, which happens when sheets are broken, drilled or weathered until the surface erodes. Encapsulation deals with that risk at source. The sheets are cleaned under controlled conditions, defects such as failed fixings and cracked laps are repaired, and the whole surface is sealed so that fibres are locked in and the weather is locked out.
The practical advantages over removal are significant. The building stays in use, there is no strip-out programme to plan around tenants, no skip-loads of asbestos waste to dispose of, and the cost is typically well below a full re-sheet. For an occupied unit in Manchester, keeping the doors open during the work is often the deciding factor.
Where it sits in your asbestos management plan
The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 place a duty to manage on whoever controls a non-domestic building. You must know where asbestos is, record its condition, assess the risk and maintain a written plan for managing it. Encapsulating a sound roof is a recognised way of discharging that duty: the material is left undisturbed, its condition is improved, and the work is documented in your register and management plan.
What the regulations never ask you to do is panic. A sound, sealed asbestos cement roof can be managed in place for years. Equally, they never let you ignore a deteriorating one.
The honest limits: roofs we will not coat
Encapsulation has a hard boundary, and we hold to it. If sheets are friable, soft, delaminating or extensively broken, a coating cannot rescue them. Coating a failing roof simply buries the problem and wastes your money. In those cases the right advice is licensed removal and replacement, and that is the advice we give, even though it means we do not win the job. Where deterioration is patchy rather than general, the survey may support replacing individual sheets and encapsulating the rest, but only the survey can confirm that.
What a survey visit covers
We are a survey-led contractor, based in the South East and working across England, with Manchester and the wider North West well inside our normal range. A survey visit typically establishes:
- The overall condition of the sheets, laps and fixings
- Whether the surface is sound enough to accept a coating system
- Any localised damage that needs repair or sheet replacement first
- Rooflights, flashings and gutters that should be addressed in the same programme
- Whether encapsulation is honestly the right recommendation at all
If your industrial unit, warehouse or farm building near Manchester is carrying an ageing asbestos cement roof, the sensible first step is a condition survey. From there, the recommendation follows the evidence, not the other way round.
