Seriously, don’t panic. There’s a ridiculous amount of scaremongering around asbestos, a lot of it fuelled by the removal companies, who make a very good living exploiting people’s fears.
if you Google asbestos removal in your area, you’ll be surprised at the number of these businesses there are - it’s because a huge percentage of the UK’s housing stock and public buildings (mainly 1940s-1980s) contain it, and certain types can only be removed under license - which is basically a license to print money. Most of us have quite safely lived, worked and gone to school in buildings full of asbestos.
The ‘one fibre’ thing refers to the fact you can become ill from inhaling one fibre - but in order for that to be even remotely possible, you’d need to be heavily exposed to airborne particles of broken or degraded material, which is vanishingly unlikely in most domestic situations. Unless your house is a snowstorm of asbestos, there’s no way a single spiralling microscopic fibre can find its way into you or anyone else in your family.
And it has to be fibres from a couple of very specific types of asbestos, in very specific unstable materials. Most is completely stable and the sheets can just be removed and wrapped in plastic by the householder and taken to the local tip, where there’s usually a special holding area for it.
My house was originally built in the 40s and we recently discovered an amount of asbestos sheeting in the loft, some of it broken. Like you, I was immediately anxious, worrying about the risk and the exposure my children may have had in the past. But then I rationalised that guys from all the four companies who came to quote were poking around up there without masks or anything else. They’re exposed to asbestos on a daily basis and didn’t seem remotely bothered.
The first three companies were soooo lovely and helpful, so very quick to arrive to quote for us - so many credentials, so many years of experience, such professional vans and uniforms. They all measured and form-filled and sucked their teeth, and finally reassured us they could do a licensed removal (safety protocols, sealed chambers etc) of this very dangerous material, that it would only take a week or so; that they’d need to close access to the top floor of the house; that they could ‘decontaminate’ our belongings and ensure everything was safely disposed of. Their quotes were between £8.5 and £10.5K + VAT, and DH and I had a week of stressful, sleepless nights wondering where the hell we were going to get the money from - because, you know, ASBESTOS 💀, and we had no choice, what else could we do?
The fourth guy walked in, took one look at it and said he was 99% certain the material was totally safe and had been wrongly classified, and told us that any asbestos contractor would have been able to see that at a glance. We had it retested and he was right. He took it away and and air tested the loft for a few hundred quid (he said we could have done it ourselves for nothing, but we gladly paid him as we were so grateful for his honesty). He also told us that even if it had been the really terrible, scary stuff, it would have taken about a day to remove and clean up, and he’d have done it under licensed conditions for a tiny fraction of the other quotes.
Don’t underestimate how much frightening information is put about by sharky chancers who are looking to profit from people’s fear and lack of understanding.
Please sleep easy and don’t worry about your little girl. There’s no way a surveyor would allow your family to live in an unsafe building.