The National Asbestos Exposure Register allows individual people to make a record of situations where they have been exposed to asbestos. It has a different purpose to the individual Asbestos Registers that businesses are required to have, listing all the places where asbestos has been found on their premises.
It’s useful to keep a national register of exposure to asbestos in case a person who has been exposed develops an asbestos-related disease in the future.
The Register is managed by the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency.
What does this mean for employers?
If you’re an employer and one of your employees is exposed to asbestos in the workplace, they now have an easy way of putting this on the official record.
Hopefully, this will give employers an incentive to make sure their asbestos records and procedures are up to date. For any premises where asbestos-containing materials have been found, you need an asbestos register and management plan. And if you need to have asbestos removed from your workplace, make sure it’s done properly, with air quality monitoring in place. Do it to protect yourself against legal liability in the decades to come — but more importantly, do it to protect the health of your employees.
