On projects like Battersea, Ferrybridge and Shell Tower, the removal is rarely the hard part. Keeping everyone around it aligned is.
I have delivered asbestos removal on some of the larger projects in this country: Battersea Power Station, Ferrybridge, Shell Tower, and a number of national frameworks. People assume the challenge on a job that size is the removal itself. It rarely is. The real challenge is keeping the number of people aligned around it.
On a project at scale, you are not just dealing with a client. You have the client, their management team, consultants, project managers, quantity surveyors, and on the heavier schemes, plenty of other trades too, scaffolding especially. Each has their own part of the jigsaw to manage and deliver, and each has their own nuances. Get that wrong and the whole thing quietly turns into a straight line: client to their team, to the consultant, to the removal contractor, everyone passing information down the chain and hoping it arrives intact.
What actually works is the round table. Everyone preaches it, but it takes real effort to hold on to. The conversation has to focus on what we need to achieve, how we will achieve it, and the best way to do it, with a clear eye on cost, every safety requirement, and the client's deliverables. Have that conversation properly, and you drive towards a right-first-time outcome: delivered on time, within budget, and with no health and safety incidents. That is always the goal.
The other half of it is breaking the job down. A scheme of that size is unmanageable if you treat it as one lump. You break it into smaller facets, and rather than running them one after another, you have several live at once, each manageable in its own right. That only holds together if the programme has real detail. A programme that lists four months of asbestos removal as a single line will cause you far more grief than one with ten or fifteen clearly defined work facets.
When the programme is detailed, everyone round the table can look ahead and catch issues early. Someone will say, 'In two months you will be grit-blasting that soffit, so you will need compressors, blasting media, and a power supply that might not be on site.' Or the consultant will look at the two days you have allowed for a four-stage clearance and tell you they need four. That is exactly the conversation you want at tender stage, not halfway through the job. Detail and transparency up front are what keep a complex project on the rails.
