A friend of mine has bought a flat on the top floor of a large Victorian house.

All the doors are original, but have been covered on one side with what turns out to be asbestos, to make them into fire doors.

We want to remove the asbestos but retain the doors. One company quoted £2,000 to remove the 4 doors, take them away and bring them back without the asbestos. Another quoted £250 to remove the doors and dispose of them at the tip. Another said it was not possible to remove the doors and then take off the asbestos as the doors would be classed as "contaminated".

In practice we'll probably have new fire doors fitted but I wondered what opinion is about the above?

We'd presumably have had to put some form of modern sheeting back on the original doors to make them into fire doors, and they looked horrible, so new doors would at least look a lot better.