Please place your comments below regarding the new Surveyors Guide which can be accessed and purchased for £10.95 from the HSE website.
Tags: ACAD, Asbestos, Asbestos Guide, HSE, HSG 264, Surveyor, Surveyor Guide
Please place your comments below regarding the new Surveyors Guide which can be accessed and purchased for £10.95 from the HSE website.
Tags: ACAD, Asbestos, Asbestos Guide, HSE, HSG 264, Surveyor, Surveyor Guide
Attended regional BOHS/ATAC Seminar this week. One very simple point.
Surely the way to solve all issues discussed ie quality of surveys, quality of reports etc would be to make accreditation/certification COMPULSORY not just strongly recommend it!
This would increase overall standard in the surveying industry and make it a level playing field for companies to compete for work.
Simple solution, i can t be the only one who thinks this is by far the best way to move forward!
I agree that would seem by far to be the easier answer. However, it is not that simple, as we all know it takes a long time to get these re-writes out which means that the old MDHS 100 was out of step with CAR2006. You must bear in mind that the new survey guide is “Guidence” and cannot require somthing to be mandatory that is not in the legislation CAR2006. So to make accreditation/certification mandatory would require a re-write of CAR2006 and while this is not impossible it is difficult and time consuming requiring the amended regulations to be drafted, sent before Parliment, and an finally and act of Parliment to bring them into force. The reality is that during the consultation period during which the proposed changes to MDHS100 were discussed, it was made clear by the HSE that the new document could not drive new legislation but must work within the framework of existing law. So we must wait until the next version of CAR, 2011/2/3? perhaps!
Totally agree with Mighelle, but as we are embarking on UKAS accreditation now ourselves, I am struggling to justify the fees they are charging. For small companies let alone one man bands (understand about ABICS) could they not reduce fees? The time to prepare for the inspections etc leaves small companies struggling with every day things who don’t have the luxury of having someone employed to deal with it.
I believe UKAS is to review its fees at the end of March so ACAD could really help here with a petition from its members to get a scale of charges agreed?
I do understand the concern of smaller analytical companies and the cost burden of acheiving and maintaining UKAS accreditation. I have discussed this with UKAS management in the past but their feelings are that the cost should be passed on to the clients. This would be all well and good if it were a level playing field but then you hear of other “UKAS” accredited companies charging ridiculas low fees for bulk samples, or of analysts doing several clearances in a day, etc. This means that a company that complies with all UKAS requirements and the associated cost overheads, finds it very difficult to compete with other such companies that are prepared to “skip” important QC procedures. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Enjoyed the posts..
Well I arrived here on another post but ended up staying for 20 minutes reading your stuff! Enjoyed it
I’m not sure how much of a guarentee of quality UKAS is, I’ve seen some pretty horrendous stuff done by UKAS accreditied inspection bodies in my time. I would rather see the guidance concentrate on how to define competent surveyors, experience, types of owrk undertaken etc., rather than the simple tick box of accreditition.
You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view
Nice looking blog you have here. The theme is awesome, great color combination.
Peter Morgan’s comments regarding UKAS accredited bodies is a very good one. I for one have witnessed a number of analysts working for UKAS accredited labs performing tests without an MPL test slide, stage micrometer, phase telescope or even being able to set up the microscope properly? I have seen 4SC where the analyst has put 8 pumps in a large enclosure, they all went on at exactly 20:00 and they all ran for exactly 60 minutes at exactly 8 l/min and then the analyst took these pumps out, mounted the slides and counted them in 15 minutes. There is also a number of labs that I have heard of who are charging as little as £5 a bulk sample and are doing upwards of 100 samples a day. How do they get away with it? My own experiences with UKAS is that they are focused upon complience and do not look for evidence of people covering up fiddles. This is not to say that there are not many good companies who work to the UKAS standards and deliver a very high standard of service and with the new surveyors guide we have tried to beef up the quality checks that an organisation should have in place.
On a different topic, I wonder how many of you out there use the half mask type RPE? If you do are you aware that in HSG 53 it clearly states that this type of mask should only be used for up to 1 hour. This is something I was only recently made aware of when it was raised during a HSE site visit and it has serious implications for many types of operations requiring this type of mask. I can think of many occaisions when analyst will spend more than an hour inside an enclosure performing a visual or when asbestos cement roof sheets are being removed from a large building where currently the 1 hour rule will be exceeded. I am advising all of our members to review their procedures to address this issue in light of this. I have also discussed this at the ALG Technical Sub Committee seeking clearer guidance on how long a break should be between wearing the mask, alternative RPE, etc.
In reply to costs of bulk analysis, I would like to say that we are one of those labs that provide the analysis for £5 per sample for long term contracts. This is purely because our competitors are charging £2-3 per sample and in order not to lose our customers to these labs we need to analyse samples at a loss and hope we gain on the air monitoring.
We also have the same problem with air testing and surveys. We are up against companies without UKAS accreditation for surveys and it is getting increasingly difficult to compete with some of the ridiculous quotations that are being submitted. How can anyone carry out a demo survey to a domestic property in 1hour?
asbestos…
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Dear All I thought as we are a professional asbestos removal company in the United Kingdom I thought I would write about how to manage your asbestos problem?
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