How We Verify Listings
Last updated: 16 August 2026
Every company on this site is here because it appears on the Health & Safety Executive’s asbestos licence register. We don’t accept submissions and we don’t take payment for a listing. This page sets out exactly how the data gets here, so you can check our working.
The Source
Our source is the CONIAC register of currently licensed asbestos contractors, published at coniac.org.uk. CONIAC is the Construction Industry Advisory Committee, which works with the HSE. The register is the authoritative list of who holds a licence.
From it we take the company name, licence number, licence type, licence expiry date, and registered address. We do not edit any of those fields.
What We Add
A licence number on its own isn’t much use to someone trying to get a garage roof removed. So we add phone numbers, websites, locations and, where they exist, public review counts, drawn from public business listings.
Added details are clearly secondary to the licence data. If a phone number is out of date, the licence entry is still correct — and the licence is the part that matters legally.
The Weekly Re-Check
The register is re-downloaded and compared against the last accepted copy every Monday. Licences lapse, companies are re-licensed under new numbers, and firms close. A directory that is built once and left alone is wrong within months.
Four safeguards stop that re-check from doing more harm than good:
- Matched on licence number, not company name. Names get reformatted; licence numbers don’t.
- Renewal-aware. An asbestos licence number encodes the year it was issued, so a renewal changes the number even though the company hasn’t. We match those to the existing listing and record a licence change, rather than deleting a company and re-adding it as new.
- A sanity gate on the download. If the file comes back with fewer than 90% of the rows we last accepted, the run stops. A truncated or garbled download can’t mass-delete listings.
- A two-week grace period before removal. A company that disappears from the register is only removed after it is absent from two consecutive weekly checks. One bad export doesn’t take a working business off the site.
Nothing publishes automatically. Each week’s changes are written to a report that a person reviews before anything goes live.
Licence Types
The register distinguishes what a licence permits. Current counts:
| Licence type | Companies listed |
|---|---|
| Standard Licence | 318 |
| Scaffolding Licence | 14 |
| Maintenance Licence | 5 |
| Total | 337 |
A standard licence covers licensable asbestos removal work. Scaffolding and maintenance licences are narrower. Check the type on a company’s listing covers the work you need doing.
What a Licence Does Not Tell You
This is the part most directories leave out.
- A licence is permission, not a review. It means the HSE is satisfied the company can work safely with asbestos. It says nothing about price, punctuality, or how they left the garden.
- We don’t inspect anyone’s work. We have never visited a site or audited a job. Any review counts shown come from public sources and are not ours.
- Licences expire. We publish the expiry date on each listing, but the register is a weekly snapshot. A licence can lapse or be revoked between our checks.
- Not all asbestos work needs a licensed contractor. Some lower-risk work is non-licensed or notifiable non-licensed work (NNLW). A licensed firm can do it, but so can others.
- Being absent from this site doesn’t make a company unlicensed. A licence granted since our last check won’t appear here yet.
Before work starts, ask the contractor for their licence number and confirm it yourself on the CONIAC register. It takes a minute and it is the only check that is current at the moment you make it.
Corrections
If your company is listed and something is wrong, email janine@theasbestosregister.co.uk with the licence number.
We can correct or remove the details we added — phone number, website, address, description. We can also remove your listing entirely on request.
We can’t change licence details to something other than what the HSE register says. If your licence number, type, or expiry date is wrong on this site, it either reflects the source register or it’s our error — tell us and we’ll check which. If the source register itself is wrong, that has to be corrected at the HSE before it can be corrected here.