Yes, you need to declare asbestos if you know about it. You must not hide it, and you must not give a misleading answer when a buyer or their solicitor asks about it.
But there is no asbestos-specific law for private sellers, and no asbestos question on the current TA6 form. The duty comes from the Misrepresentation Act 1967 and from your written replies to the buyer’s solicitor’s enquiries.
Most people land on this page because a surveyor has written “possible asbestos” into a report, or because they already know about the garage roof. So here is the reassurance first: in my experience it is usually a non-event, unless the material is damaged.
Everything below applies to England and Wales.
What the law actually requires you to declare
Selling a house that contains asbestos is completely legal, and it is common: an estimated 1.5 million UK buildings still contain it (ResPublica, 2019).
If you have read anything else on this subject, you have probably been shown the “Property Misdescriptions Act 2013”. There is no such Act. The Property Misdescriptions Act 1991 was repealed with effect from 1 October 2013, because general consumer law had overtaken it. Anyone citing a 2013 Act is quoting the repeal date and calling it a statute.
What does apply to you is older and blunter. The starting point is caveat emptor: you are not obliged to compile a list of everything wrong with your house.
But you must not mislead. Under the Misrepresentation Act 1967, a false statement of fact that persuades somebody to buy gives them a civil claim for damages, and in some cases the right to unwind the sale. Replies to enquiries are normally written into the sale contract, which is what gives them teeth.
Consumer law is a separate layer, and it binds your estate agent rather than you: the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 catches misleading omissions as well as false statements. Your agent can only comply with it if you have told them the truth.
The TA6 form does not ask about asbestos
The Law Society’s TA6 Property Information Form (6th edition) contains no asbestos question at all. Section 8, environmental matters, covers flooding, flood defences, radon, the Green Deal and Japanese knotweed. That is the list.
That is not a loophole. The form tells you to answer truthfully and completely from your own knowledge, warns that buyers can rely on your answers, and warns that misleading information may let a buyer claim compensation after completion.
On a house, asbestos normally arrives by a different route anyway: a specific written enquiry from the buyer’s solicitor, once their surveyor has flagged something. That written reply is the statement you can be held to. So is anything you say off the form, verbally, direct or through your agent. A casual “the garage roof’s fine” counts.
How expensive can one bad answer be? In Downing v Henderson (2023) a buyer paid £700,000 for a South West London property after the seller confirmed on the TA6 that it was not affected by Japanese knotweed. It had been, and it had been treated. The seller was ordered to pay damages plus costs of more than £200,000.
Different defect, identical mechanism: a hidden, fixable, stigmatised problem and one wrong answer on a form. It is also why I would use a good local solicitor rather than a big nationwide conveyancing firm. Replies to enquiries are exactly where a firm’s quality shows.
What to say if you genuinely don’t know
You are not liable for asbestos you genuinely did not know about, and plenty of sellers do not know. We bought a house where asbestos turned up in the roof of a detached garage, and the homeowner had no idea it was there. That was not a legal problem for him.
The problem starts when you answer “no” and the honest answer was “not known”.
“Not known” is a legitimate written answer, and the 6th edition of the TA6 deliberately added more of those options. Nobody expects you to be a surveyor. They expect you to be honest.
Use the age of the property as your first indicator. Blue and brown asbestos were banned in 1985 and white in 1999, so assume anything built before 2000 may contain it, in the usual places:
- Artex ceilings
- Garage and shed roofs
- Cement sheeting and soffits
- Pipe and boiler lagging
- Old vinyl floor tiles
You cannot confirm it by eye, because it is often painted over, and only a laboratory test settles it. So my rule is this: do not advertise problems in your marketing, never hide one you are asked about, and never guess an answer.
What asbestos actually does to a sale
Now the part you actually came for. What does it do to your price?
In my experience it tends to be a non-event unless the material is damaged, and even then the usual outcome is that the buyer asks for a price reduction. On a house it is normally only raised at all if it has come up in the buyer’s survey.
Take that detached garage roof. The asbestos was real, the seller had not declared it because he did not know it was there, and the sale still went ahead. What changed was the price: a small reduction to cover the cost of dealing with it after completion.
That reduction was not plucked out of the air. It was sized to a written quote from an asbestos removal specialist.
Condition drives all of it. Bonded cement sheeting in sound condition is a line item. Damaged, crumbling or friable material is a different conversation, because now there is work to do and somebody has to pay for it.
Get the removal quote yourself
If asbestos is going to be priced into your deal, make sure it is priced against a real number rather than the buyer’s worst-case guess. Buyers negotiate against what they imagine the work costs, and what they imagine is almost always worse than the invoice.
We see it from the buying side constantly. One buyer came to us with a quote of £15,000 for a full rewire and wanted that knocked off the price. We asked a registered electrician we work with to price the same job and it came back at £2,000. We agreed a reduction on that realistic basis and the buyer did the work after completion.
Asbestos is no different. Get a licensed specialist out, get the figure in writing, and put it on the table at the same time as the disclosure. Then you are negotiating over a quote instead of over a fear.
Leave it, seal it, or remove it?
Our rule on our own refurbishments is simple: leave it alone unless it has been damaged. Undamaged material can be sealed rather than ripped out.
Condition picks between the three options:
- Leave it in place. Right for sound, bonded material such as a cement garage roof. Declare it, note the condition, move on.
- Encapsulate it. Sealing the surface so fibres cannot escape, for a fraction of the cost of removal.
- Remove it. Using a licensed contractor, where the material is damaged or friable.
Sealed asbestos still has to be declared. It is still there.
What I would not do is strip out a sound garage roof to make the property look tidier before marketing. It is the same trap as over-refurbishing before a sale: you rarely get the money back, and you delay going to market while you spend it.
What removal costs, and why DIY does not save you money
We once bought a property where asbestos roof tiles had been left loose in the garden. We paid £2,500 to have them taken away and correctly disposed of.
Those tiles were already off the roof. Nobody had to work at height or strip anything out. Almost all of that £2,500 was the correct disposal.
That is what people miss when they think about doing it themselves. Taking asbestos out of your own home is not illegal, but disposal is regulated, licensed hazardous waste facilities are the only lawful destination, and fly-tipping asbestos is prosecuted. The saving is not really there, and the health risk is not reversible.
For comparison, Checkatrade puts a typical domestic asbestos removal job in the region of £950 to £2,000. A bonded cement garage roof usually sits at the lower end of that; larger jobs, work at height, or licensed removal of damaged material can run to several thousand pounds.
Ask any contractor for three things:
- BOHS P402 certification for surveying
- An HSE licence for licensed removal work
- A hazardous waste carrier’s licence for disposal
Then keep the paperwork, because handing a buyer the consignment note that proves the waste was disposed of properly turns the whole episode into a selling point.
So who pays to find out what you are actually dealing with?
Who pays for the asbestos survey, buyer or seller?
There is no legal duty on a residential seller to commission an asbestos survey. None.
What happens in practice is that the buyer’s RICS Home Survey, Level 2 or Level 3, flags suspected asbestos-containing materials and recommends a specialist investigation. It is then normally the buyer’s call, and the buyer’s cost, to commission one. There is no rule about it, so the cost lands wherever the negotiation puts it.
For a house, I would not pay for a speculative survey. If the property is post-2000, or the material is bonded cement in good condition, save your money: it only tends to get raised if the buyer’s surveyor raises it. Where you already know there is damaged material, spend that money on the specialist quote instead.
If you do want a survey, know which one you are buying. A management survey is non-intrusive and is the right one for a normal sale. A refurbishment and demolition survey is fully intrusive and is only needed before major works.
Current cost guides put a management survey on an average two or three bedroom house at roughly £200 to £400, depending on the size of the property, where you are, and how many samples go to the lab.
Selling a flat? Expect a report in the pack
Flats are the exception to most of the above. With a flat, solicitors normally want an asbestos report in the pack from the outset, rather than waiting for a survey to raise it.
The reason is the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012. The duty to manage asbestos applies to non-domestic premises, and that includes the common parts of blocks of flats: stairwells, corridors, plant rooms, communal boiler houses. It does not apply inside your own flat.
So the report probably already exists. Your freeholder or managing agent may hold an asbestos register or management survey for the block. Ask for it early, through the leasehold enquiries pack that goes out alongside the TA7 leasehold information form, and you take one enquiry off the critical path to exchange.
Not every sale stays that orderly, and damaged material with no budget to fix it is where deals start to wobble.
When a cash sale is the cleaner route
There is one situation where none of the above works: the material is damaged, the chain has stalled, the buyer has gone twitchy and there is no money to put it right. Once a buyer decides the property is a problem, you can end up renegotiating the same point over and over.
We buy with asbestos in place, declared and in situ. No survey, no removal, no pre-sale spend, because we are buying a property to refurbish, not a clean survey report.
- Cash offer within 24 hours
- Exchange in as little as 48 hours
- Completion typically around 28 days
We buy below market value, usually 75% to 85% of open market value, and what you get for that discount is speed and certainty rather than the best price.
If you are not under time pressure, an open-market sale with honest disclosure will usually net you more, and I tell people that on the phone every week. Declare what you know, price the work off a real quote, and asbestos stops being the thing that decides your sale.
Asbestos Holding Up Your Sale?
We buy houses and flats with asbestos in place. Get a no-obligation cash offer within 24 hours.
Common questions
Does asbestos stop you getting a mortgage or affect your insurance?
Usually not, especially for bonded cement in good condition. Where material is damaged or friable, a valuer may ask for a specialist report or recommend a retention until the work is done. Buildings insurance is generally unaffected.
Do the same rules apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland?
The TA6 is an England and Wales form. Scotland uses the Home Report and a different conveyancing process, and Northern Ireland differs again. The principle of not misleading a buyer applies everywhere.
I bought a house with asbestos and nobody told me. What now?
Check the TA6 and the written replies to enquiries to see what the seller actually stated. If they answered a direct question wrongly, speak to a solicitor about a misrepresentation claim. If they were never asked, you are unlikely to have one.
This article is general information about the law in England and Wales at the time of writing, not legal advice. Have a conveyancing solicitor review your own replies to enquiries.
