The short answer
Asbestos turns up in house roofs as asbestos cement sheeting on garages, porches and extensions, in asbestos cement gutters and downpipes, and as insulating board in external soffits. The Health and Safety Executive's rule of thumb: a building put up or refurbished before 2000 is presumed to contain asbestos. The materials look much like modern equivalents, so a sample test or a survey settles it, never a guess.
A house built or refurbished before 2000 can hold asbestos in more places than the main roof covering. The garage, gutters and eaves boards are easy to miss.
Cement sheets, gutters and downpipes
Asbestos cement is the better-known case. It was made into corrugated roof sheeting, flat panels, gutters and downpipes, and HSE names roof sheeting and rainwater goods as everyday uses. On a house, check the garage, a lean-to, a porch, an old extension or an outbuilding first. These low roofs often carry cement sheets while the main roof is slate or tile.
Is an asbestos cement roof dangerous if left alone?
Sheets of this kind can give way under a person's weight, which is why the Executive's guidance calls them fragile in every case. Stay off them, keep ladders clear of them and fix nothing to them until a plan exists. Drilling, scrubbing or cracking the sheets is a job for a specialist, not a weekend.
Lifting asbestos cement away carefully and in one piece falls into the non-licensed category, weathered sheets included, provided they are not badly damaged. Smashing it into pieces moves the job into the notifiable non-licensed group, and the Executive's own example is dropping a whole cement roof. How the work is done matters as much as what the material is, so a survey comes before any quote. If a sheet is cracked or crumbling at the edges, keep children and pets away from that part of the garden and leave it alone until it has been looked at.
Insulating board under the eaves
The second place to look is the roofline, the run of boards under and along the edge of the roof. The soffit is the panel filling the space beneath the overhanging eaves. The fascia is the upright board that caps the rafter ends and carries the gutter. Insulating board, known as AIB, turns up in external soffits, according to the Executive.
Can old soffit boards be removed like any other board?
Not safely, until someone has checked what they are. If the boards turn out to be insulating board, taking them down is frequently licensable work, though it turns on the Executive's risk assessment rules. So the board gets identified before anyone picks a method. The dividing line is the length of the job: if the assessment says work on that board will take more than a short while, it is licensable. Short jobs on AIB during a refurbishment can fall into the notifiable non-licensed group instead.
Somerset Building Control expects builders to meet asbestos-bearing materials in older property, and it draws the line at buildings from before 2000. If your fascias and soffits are due for replacement on an older house, ask for the boards to be identified before any are taken down.
Why you cannot tell by eye
People often ask whether they can spot asbestos from the pavement. The Executive itself says insulating board and its modern lookalikes are hard to separate by sight. The same goes for cement sheets: a grey corrugated panel with moss on it can be old asbestos cement or a later fibre-cement or concrete product, and colour, age and weathering do not settle it.
How do you find out for certain?
A sample sent to a laboratory, or a survey by a qualified asbestos surveyor, gives a definite answer. MyJobQuote's typical UK figure for a survey is around £325 (Sep 2026). Without a result for a building from before 2000, the sensible default is to assume it is there.
That assumption is a sensible default, not a reason to panic. Plenty of pre-2000 roofs have none in the parts you will touch. It simply means you pause, test and then plan, rather than finding out halfway through a strip. A test result also helps when you compare written quotes, because every contractor then prices the same known material.
What happens before any roof work starts
On a pre-2000 house we look at the garage roof, the guttering and the eaves boards during the survey, and you see photos of what we find. If something might be asbestos, the plan changes before a ladder goes up: nothing is drilled, snapped or dropped, and the price you receive in writing comes after the answer is known.
Where does the waste go?
Waste is wrapped twice, labelled on the outside and kept out of an ordinary skip. The exemption that lets householders move their own hazardous rubbish stops short of asbestos, so loads travel under a consignment note with a registered carrier. MyJobQuote gives around £2,750 as an average for removing an asbestos roof (Sep 2026), and the scale of the roof, access and disposal move that figure.
Our garage and asbestos roofs page covers the roofs most likely to carry cement sheets, and the roofing quote checklist shows what a clear written price should include. Photos of the roof sent through our homepage, with a rough build date for the house, let us plan the survey around the right checks.
More on roof asbestos
Is a corrugated garage roof always asbestos?
No. Corrugated garage roofs have also been made in fibre cement, metal and plastic, and viewed from the garden the four are hard to tell apart. The Executive's advice for older buildings is a safe assumption: until a laboratory result says otherwise, handle the sheets as asbestos, and keep off the roof.
Can I take down asbestos cement gutters myself?
HSE treats careful removal of asbestos cement as non-licensed work, but the word careful carries the weight. Snapping, drilling or dropping the pieces changes the category. Ask a contractor who handles asbestos waste correctly, with double-wrapping and a consignment note, rather than taking sections down and putting them in a skip.
The full picture: Roofers in Taunton · More short answers