Letter to Education Committee Chair - In Support of a National Asbestos Register

After the Government's decision to reject, once again, the Education Committee's request for the establishment of a National Asbestos Register, The National Asbestos Taskforce has written to the Committee's Chair, Helen Hayes MP.

You can find the letter below:

Dear Ms Hayes,

RE: In support of a National Asbestos Register

I am writing on behalf of the recently established Asbestos Task Force to express our deep disappointment at the Government’s response to the Education Committee’s report, Foundations of Learning: replacing RAAC and securing school buildings, particularly its rejection of the Committee’s recommendation for a national digital register of asbestos in the education estate.

The Committee’s recommendation for a central register, alongside annual reporting on HSE compliance and asbestos removal achieved through capital programmes, was a practical and proportionate response to a longstanding failure in public policy.

The Government’s decision to reject this recommendation is therefore not just disappointing but deeply revealing. It repeats a line of argument used by previous administrations and rests, in our view, on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a central digital register would involve and why it matters. Such a register would not require duty holders to generate new information or duplicate existing burdens. The relevant data is already collected through asbestos surveys and already held across the survey industry. The issue is not the absence of data, but the absence of central oversight, strategic analysis, and meaningful accountability.

A central register would strengthen, not weaken, the duty to manage asbestos. It would make it easier to identify where asbestos is located, what condition it is in, whether remediation has taken place, and where compliance may be inadequate. It would also support exactly the kind of annual reporting the Committee recommended, allowing Parliament and the public to assess whether progress is being made.

We are particularly concerned by the Government’s suggestion that such a system would require disproportionate resources without clear benefit. That claim is hard to reconcile with the human reality of asbestos exposure. More than 50,000 people have died from mesothelioma in the UK over the past twenty years, and there is growing concern that exposure is increasingly being linked to the kind of low-level, repeated contact found in public buildings, including schools. Mesothelioma remains a death sentence for those diagnosed. In that context, it is difficult to understand how a measure designed to improve oversight of a known carcinogen in the public estate can be dismissed as offering no clear benefit.

In our view, the Government’s position amounts to a refusal to confront the scale of the issue. Public sector workers, including teachers, support staff and other education professionals, should not be expected to risk their long-term health, or potentially their lives, as an unspoken price of service because the state has failed to build the basic infrastructure of proper asbestos oversight and management. Yet when it comes to asbestos in public buildings, ministers continue to resist even the most modest data-driven reform.

The cost argument is equally weak. The state already operates national property-related registers at modest cost. It is simply not credible to argue that a comparable system for tracking the presence and condition of a known carcinogen is beyond reach. The obstacle here is not technical feasibility. It is political will.

We are grateful to the Committee for the seriousness with which it has approached this issue and for the clarity of its recommendations. We hope the Committee will continue to press the Government on this matter and maintain scrutiny of how asbestos is being managed across the education estate. We would be very pleased to demonstrate for you a prototype of an asbestos database, developed by the asbestos industry, and to support the Committee’s work in any way that would be helpful.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Pickles, Founder of Airtight on Asbestos

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union (NEU)

Steve Sadley, Chief Executive, Asbestos Removal Contractors Association (ARCA)

Liz Darlison, Chief Executive, Mesothelioma UK

John Richards, Asbestos Information CIC

Mark Morrin, ResPublica

About the Asbestos Task Force

The National Asbestos Taskforce is a new coalition of industry bodies, trade unions, charities and campaign groups formed to press for the phased removal of asbestos from the UK built environment. Launched alongside International Workers’ Memorial Day / World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2026, it argues that the UK can no longer rely on indefinite management of asbestos in ageing buildings and instead needs a long-term, government-mandated removal programme, beginning with the highest-risk materials. The Taskforce brings together organisations including Airtight on Asbestos, Mesothelioma UK, the NEU, ARCA, the TUC and others, and has already begun engaging ministers on the need for a more ambitious national response to one of the UK’s most enduring occupational and public health risks.