Our licence status, our margin, and who clears the area

1. Our licence status

NZ Asbestos Removal holds no WorkSafe asbestos licence of any kind: no Class A removal licence, no Class B removal licence and no asbestos assessor licence. We are not IANZ accredited. We hold no qualification that lets us take a sample, remove asbestos or issue a clearance certificate.

Everything on this site that says "licensed", "accredited" or "competent" refers to a partner, never to us. You can check any partner's licence yourself on the WorkSafe asbestos licence holder register, which shows the class and whether the licence is Current, Suspended, Expired or Cancelled. We check it before a partner is engaged and we expect you to check it too.

A PCBU who commissions asbestos removal must engage a remover licensed for that work, unless the work is 10 m² or less of non-friable asbestos (counted cumulatively) or minor contamination — and even then the person doing it must be a competent person trained under reg 17.

2. How we make money

• On the test. You pay $249including GST. That covers the surveyor's visit, the laboratory fee for one sample and our margin. Extra samples are $85 each on the same basis.
• On removal we arrange. Our margin is inside the single fixed quote you see. You are not shown a trade price and then charged a fee on top; there is one number, and you decide against it.
• On nothing else. No referral fees, no lead sales, no commission from laboratories, no advertising from removers, no affiliate links. The guides and rules pages sell nothing.

The $249 test fee is credited against a removal we arrange within 90 days of the result, so paying for the test does not cost you anything extra if you go ahead.

3. The conflict, stated plainly

We earn more if your material turns out to be asbestos and you ask us to remove it. That is a real commercial interest and pretending otherwise would be worse than naming it. Three things keep it from touching the answer you get:

1. We do not decide the result. An IANZ-accredited laboratory does, and you get its own report, unedited. We never rewrite it, summarise it in place of sending it, or describe the risk in your house in our own words.
2. We do not decide the licence class. The regulations do. Friable means Class A (reg 54); more than 10 m² of non-friable, counted across the whole project, means Class B or A (reg 56). Those thresholds are published on our rules page with their numbers so you can check the quote against them.
3. We do not clear the site. See below.

If you would rather have no commercial link at all between the tester and the remover, that is a legitimate choice and there are independent New Zealand consultancies who test and never remove. We would rather say so than have you find out later.

4. Why the clearance is independent

After licensed removal, a clearance inspection must be carried out by someone independent of the remover: a licensed asbestos assessor for Class A work, and an independent competent person otherwise. For a home, the licensed remover commissioned to do the work must make sure it happens.

We engage and pay the clearance provider separately from the remover, so the person inspecting the work is not being paid by the person who did it. On a Class A job that person is a licensed asbestos assessor, who also does the air monitoring the regulations require. The certificate they issue is yours; the area must not be reoccupied until it exists (reg 42).

5. Referrals

We run no referral scheme and sell no leads. If you ask for a removal quote in a region where we have no contracted remover, we will tell you that plainly and point you at the WorkSafe register so you can find a licence holder yourself. We do not pass your details on unless you explicitly ask us to, and we are not paid for doing so. If that ever changes, the fee will be disclosed on this page before it applies to anyone.

6. What we have not claimed

There are no reviews, ratings, star scores, job counts, years-in-business figures, accreditation badges or staff numbers on this site, because we have none that are real yet. There is no photo of a job we have done. When those exist, they will appear with their source. The editorial policy lists what we removed from an earlier version of this site and why.