A round of HSE compliance inspections began in April 2026, and a recent prosecution ended with a suspended prison sentence and a director disqualification alongside the fines.
The Health and Safety Executive began a fresh round of asbestos management inspections on 1 April 2026, timed to coincide with Global Asbestos Awareness Week, and those compliance checks have continued through the year. Inspectors are looking at how duty holders manage asbestos in non-domestic premises, and where management is found lacking, they are taking enforcement action to require proper measures be put in place.
A prosecution reported this year shows how far the consequences now reach. A site manager received a twelve month suspended prison sentence, a five year director disqualification and a three month electronically monitored curfew after failing to engage a licensed contractor for the safe clearance of asbestos from a demolition site. The two companies involved were fined a combined £88,300 and ordered to pay more than £9,000 in costs and surcharges.
The detail worth noting is that the penalty did not stop at the corporate fine. Individual accountability, in the form of a suspended sentence and a disqualification, is what changes behaviour in boardrooms, and it reflects a wider pattern of the HSE being far more willing to name individuals and publicise outcomes.
For duty holders, the practical question is simple enough. If an inspector arrived unannounced tomorrow, could you produce a current asbestos survey and a management plan that reflects the building as it stands today, rather than as it stood when the survey was commissioned? That is the gap most enforcement action exposes, and it is entirely avoidable. It is a particular exposure across London and the South East, where a large proportion of the commercial and public building stock was constructed before the 1999 ban and asbestos containing materials remain in place under management rather than removed.
People are good at the start. They get the survey done, they get the management plan written, and then it goes in a drawer and nobody looks at it again. Then the building changes, work gets done, and the register no longer matches reality. That is what an inspector finds, and by then it is too late to fix it quietly. A register is a live document or it is nothing.
