Public Liability Insurance and Small Business Cover
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Choosing your business insurance can be complicated enough, as there are many considerations to make. Therefore, to make life easier you may also want to take time to look for a reliable business insurance broker. Many brokers online can provide you with a vast amount of information regarding business insurance. Brokers may have access to a wide range of specialist insurance providers who offer competitive premiums for the insurance.
When choosing your broker you may want to look into the background of the company. You may do this using the information on their website. Almost all brokers will offer an “about us” page and provide you with a brief history of the company. There are many aspects to business insurance and many types of insurance and all of these should be explained thoroughly so you can choose the most suitable insurance for your business. A good insurance broker should have a broad range of insurance products from which you may choose.
You may also check out the insurance companies the broker uses to find you insurance. Many of these may be leading insurance companies that you have heard of and which have also been in business for many years and are household names.
Of course, you may want to check that the insurance broker you are thinking about taking your cover from offers the type of insurance you need. There are many different types of insurance including public and employers’ liability insurance, indemnity and product liability cover to consider. There are also many different types of businesses so ensure that your business is covered by the broker.
When choosing your business insurance broker you may also want to consider the level of customer service that is offered by them. Also how easy it may be to get in touch with the company if you should have to make a claim on your insurance.
The heart of many a small business is a white van. You see them everywhere and they come in other colours, too, of course. It is a versatile and robust workhorse, but like any other vehicle on the roads, has to be insured. But van insurance also comes in all shapes and sizes, so it is worthwhile spending some time choosing the insurance that best suits your van, your business and you.
- Know your options – although minimum third party insurance is required by law, is there a big enough investment in the value of the van to warrant cover of additional risks, such as fire or comprehensive cover. It will be important not to skimp on the cover not only in view of the van’s value itself, but of the vehicle’s indispensability to your business needs;
- Who’s driving? – if you are a one-man business and the only person likely to be driving the van, then savings on the insurance premiums can often be made by restricting cover to the named driver only. If you need the freedom for anyone to be able to drive it, then you will clearly need “any driver” cover;
- Excess – a good way of reducing the insurance premiums, of course, is to increase your level of voluntary excess (the first part of any repair bill or claim that you take on yourself). You might find this a particularly worthwhile way of reducing the premiums if the van is not of any great value, but you will need to remember your financial obligation to make this contribution in the event of a claim;
- Claims – whilst on the subject of claims, it is also important to remember that the best way of keeping your van insurance premiums as low as possible is to reduce the number of claims in general. Although the van might be a works vehicle and might not have cost a lot to buy, careful driving remains the most effective way of avoiding claims and keeping your no claims discount intact;
- Helping you choose – you are probably aware of any number of companies offering van insurance, but the choice between competing insurers can be bewildering. Using a specialist business insurance website may be able to match up you and your van with the most appropriate and cost-effective insurance on the market.
The benefits to having builders insurance can often be numerous. If you own a building company then it may be worthwhile looking into insurance as the consequences of failing to have protection behind you may be devastating. When considering insurance for your builders business there are different types you will need to look at.
- Public liability insurance – There are many vulnerabilities when working in the building trade. Heights will be a factor with many jobs you undertake and this alone can mean working in a hazardous environment as even when the strictest safety measures are in place, accidents can happen. Of all the types of insurance the business owner may consider, this should be a consideration.
Public liability insurance may provide protection for your business in the event that an accident should happen on your site and a member of the public was to get hurt. In general, the insurance may pay out in the event of a death, injury or if a third parties property are damaged due to your business activities. When considering this type of insurance you may have to check the minimum amount the policy may payout in the event of a claim.
- Employer’s liability insurance – This protection may come with the same benefits as the insurance named above. However, it will generally protect any members of your workforce. This may apply to those who worked for you full time, part time or even on the odd occasion. It is a legal requirement that you have employers’ liability insurance, though there are exceptions.
The difference insurance may make
Imagine for a second that you and your team were working on a site in a built up area. Even though you had put the tightest of safety measures in place, a piece of equipment was to fall from a height and hit a member of the public injuring them. The individual may be in their rights to take court action against you for the injury. If you did not have liability insurance to fall back onto, where may you get the money needed for legal costs and compensation?
The same scenario may occur and a member of your workforce may fall from scaffolding. With employers’ liability builders insurance in place, your business will typically have financial assistance with which to help meet the cost of the claim.
If you are a builder, a carpenter, painter, decorator, electrician, engineer, architect or plumber you are considered a tradesman, so too can be appliance repairmen and anyone else who works in the building trade.
What is different about tradesman insurance?
Insurance policies catering to tradesmen differ and are relevant to a particular business, yet they will typically include such items as liability covers such as public and employers’ liability insurance as well as cover for goods stolen, personal injury, damage to premises, negligence claims, faulty materials or equipment and may even offer cover against tax inspections.
Consider for example the repercussions of having to compensate a homeowner for damage to their property or to themselves resulting from faulty equipment or materials you have installed in their home. Claims such as these can be extremely expensive and may be the difference between being able to continuing in business or not.
As each policy is different it may be necessary that you explore what options would best suit your circumstances and your requirements. Tradesman insurance can also be called a “business insurance package” because it offers a full package deal containing different types of insurance cover under one policy.
Apart from loss or damage to property and equipment, tradesman insurance offers high levels of liability cover. In the building trade injuries and loss are more common than in an office based environment. Public and Employers Liability insurance offers cover against any possible compensation claims arising from clients, customers, suppliers and staff who may suffer either loss to persons or property, injury, illness and even death.
Why is tradesman insurance necessary?
Being a professional you realise the importance of protecting your business and the importance of providing cover against accidents, failed equipment or products. Even in the most well run businesses mishaps happen. Another reason for tradesman insurance is because by law you are required to have at least some insurance cover, and if you are employing workers, contract or permanent it is vital that you have liability cover.
Often when bidding for a lucrative contract with larger firms or councils, they will often make insurance a non negotiable condition on your part.
Key features of tradesmen insurance
- Liabilty cover such as public liability and employers’ liability insurance.
- Tool cover which provides protection against loss or damage to your tools and equipment and which can also provide insurance for your items in transit.
- Plant cover including huts on site, plant hire and equipment and covers of these items during transit
- Professional indemnity offers you an added cover above your trades insurance and is designed to protect you against claims, loss or damage as a result of negligence on your part.
- Personal accident cover offers you protection against loss of income resulting from injury or accidents and which prevents your from being able to work
Tradesman insurance – do you need it? This question can only be answered by you.
Do you have business equipment insurance in your policy? If not you may potentially lose a great deal of money if the worst were to happen and you lost your equipment as the result of a fire or theft for example. Business insurance can be taken out to cover many different types of businesses and needs. There can be benefits to taking out standard insurance for your business such as personal and public liability insurance and if you check the small print, you may find other elements of protection are provided too.
How you might benefit from insuring your equipment
If you have business equipment insurance then you may have protection up to a certain amount for your equipment, so you do have to find out what limits the provider imposes. If you were a builder or plumber for example then your equipment insurance may protect your tools. Tools are expensive to replace and if yours should be damaged or stolen, you may have the policy to fall back onto to replace them. Without this, your business may not be able to function if you do not have money in the bank to go out and replace them yourself.
If you were in the office business, having your equipment insured may be classed as being essential. Your policy may provide insurance for such as computers, laptops, scanner, printers and fax machines among many others. If these went up in smoke, were damaged or stolen you may lose many thousands of pounds depending on the size of the office. Without the money to replace these it may mean the end of your business.
Transportation cover
Along with your equipment being insured on your business premises, insurance companies may sometimes also stretch this to equipment that is in transit. For instance if you business involves selling equipment and you are taking them or have sent them by courier to a customer and there were to be damaged or stolen you may still be able to make a claim on your insurance policy.
Protection for the plant
If you are in the building trade, and have a plant or site, usually there will be a lot of money in that site by way of machinery and site huts. You should check with the insurance provider to find out if they offer you plant protection. This may allow you to make a claim on the insurance in the event that your plant was broken into or if there should be a fire. Generally, any machinery that you had hired may also be covered but again you do need to check in the terms of your policy before you take it out. You may also check to find out if machinery and equipment may be covered whilst you were transferring them to the site and something happened.
Always check the small print
Whichever provider you decide to take your business equipment insurance with, the small print should not be overlooked. This is where you will find out the limits the insurance provider may payout in the event that you should have to make a claim on the insurance policy.
You know how the old adage goes about a tradesman and his tools – they make all the difference between a job well done, or not done at all. To avoid any temptation of blaming the tools for the job, many tradesmen will use the best that money can buy. Tools – as they can readily tell you – do not come cheap. So, if you are concerned about protecting your tools and the investment in time and money that they represent, you will probably consider some form of tradesman tools cover.
As you go into it, there are a few things that might repay particular attention:
- What’s covered? – it might not be as straight forward as it sounds, so it is worth looking at the finer print of the policy. Some may include cover not only for your own hand and power tools and equipment, but anything that could be considered constructional plant or machinery, together with any trailers and site huts or caravans (including their contents);
- How much is covered? – once again, policies differ and you will probably want to be assured that you have adequate cover, without paying over the odds. In other words, you will aim to be neither under- nor over-insured. Policies will typically set limits on what can be claimed for any single item of plant, tools or equipment, together with an overall maximum sum insured;
- Where? – tradesman tools cover generally recognises that the job requires travelling from one contract to the next and from one site to another. Cover is typically for “all risks”, therefore, and maintains security of the tools, plant and equipment on the current job and in transit between jobs. If you travel abroad for your work, you might also wish to check whether the cover extends across Europe or is limited to the territorial UK only;
- Owned or hired – many policies cover loss, damage or theft to both those tools, plant and equipment that you personally own and those that have been hired in for a particular contract or contracts.
There is more to tradesman tools insurance, therefore, than immediately meets the eye. Using a specialist business insurance website may help you to decide what policies are available at the most suitable prices on the market and, more to the point, perhaps, which policies are especially suited to your own business.
With unemployment escalating the result is that more and more people are working from home, or are gearing up toward working from home. Home based businesses vary tremendously and range from craft type products to garage “manufacturing” workshops and many computer professionals and consulting services are also moving to home based offices. Looking at a home based business in the legal sense, they aren’t any different from any other business as owners still have to pay taxes, put together legal structures and interact with customers.
Yet a key item often overlooked by home based businesses is insurance, and the answer is a work from home insurance policy which is required over and above a normal homeowner’s policy.
Specialist insurance
Home business insurance is specialist insurance cover. Without it your business and livelihood may be at risk and your household insurance may not provide you with cover against damage and loss to your business equipment nor can it cover you for liability issues that often arise in business environments. Another consideration and something that may need to be checked is the fact that your standard household policy may be in danger of being invalid if you do not have work from home insurance cover.
What should be covered in your work from home insurance?
1. Contents and buildings
Content insurance usually covers anything your business requires to function, such as loss or damage to office equipment used the premises which include computers, telephones, copy equipment, office supplies and even stock. Mobile items such as laptops or mobile phones may also be covered under an ‘all risks’ clause.
Contents insurance will not usually cover the actual building.
2. Liability cover
Working from a home based office does not relieve you of liability toward customers, products or services and staff, if you employ any. As a business owner you are still liable for the safety and protection of anyone on your premises or anyone dealing or handling your products. If anyone suffers injury, illness or loss of their possessions while in your employ or on your premises you may be faced with a financial obligation toward them and this is when public liability insurance and employers’ liability insurance covers may be a wise choice. The latter is, in most cases, a legal requirement for any business, but there are exceptions.
Liability cover also extends to legal fees and will offer you cover in the event you are caught up in litigation and are responsible for expensive legal costs as a result, while a professional indemnity can offer you cover against such things such as theft of clients money, loss or damage to data or documents belonging to your clients and also infringement of intellectual property such as trademarks or copyrights. Professional indemnity may also cover you against negligence or errors on your part toward your client.
Work from home insurance while being more specialised than household insurance, offers home business owners complete business insurance cover that is capable of coping with any and all business related issues.
Business contents insurance may be taken out to cover anything that may be needed to run your business from home. This may usually include your stock, computers, monitors, fax machines, indeed virtually anything that if you were to have it stolen or it was destroyed or damaged, may mean you may not be able to continue trading and running your home business.
Factors you may wish to take into account
How much insurance do I need? When applying for cover you should take an inventory of all your stock and equipment. This should include everything that may stop you from doing business if they were to be destroyed, damaged or stolen. When deciding how much cover you need you may want to bear in mind that this may go towards how much you have to pay out in monthly premiums for the insurance. With this in mind while you do not want to take out too much insurance, which may boost up the cost of the cover, you also do not want to underestimate the value and be underinsurance, and therefore not have enough cover.
If you did not have business contents insurance to fall back onto and the worst scenario arose and you lost everything you may have to find money yourself to replace your lost stock and any equipment. This may run into thousands of pounds and if you cannot raise the money, you may even lose your business. Never assume that just because you have home contents insurance behind you your office equipment and stock may be covered.
Home contents insurance generally protects your personal belongings and contents. It might not stretch to your office, in fact, if you have not made your insurance company aware that you are running a business from your home, your home policy will typically not be valid if you were to have to make a claim. Always check the terms and conditions of any form of insurance you are considering, there will be limits in the insurance as to what is covered. By going over the insurance with a fine toothcomb, you can be sure there may be no surprises if a claim had to be made.
In today’s world most dentists need to be aware of their exposure to risk and this inevitably leads to questions about the adequacy of insurance. If you do not have good rounded dental surgery insurance you could be facing potentially ruinous costs in some circumstances.
How could this happen?
It is perhaps worth thinking for a moment or two of the risks you face on a day–to-day basis:
- Building problems. Natural disasters and sheer bad luck can leave you not only with large repair bills but also rob you of your normal place of work and very possibly your income for the period it is out of action.
- Contents troubles. You very likely have expensive and specialist equipment in your office and surgery. If it is stolen or accidentally damaged you could face major costs for repair, replacement and short-term rentals.
- Staff accidents. If you employ staff and they suffer injury due to an accident then you can expect to be held accountable – in fact, insuring against this through employers liability insurance is usually a legal requirement.
- Public liability. If a patient or someone with them suffers an accident while they’re in your surgery, you may face a hefty compensation claim and a high court award against you in some situations.
- Malpractice. This is a large subject in modern medical circles. Rightly or wrongly, society is increasingly inclined to hold medical professionals to be accountable for their errors or even for poor advice. The costs here can be extremely high in severe cases and the legal costs of defending yourself equally so.
- People issues. Claims for gender, ageist or racial discrimination, sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour are no longer the rarity they once were. Once again here the legal and indirect costs of defending yourself could be very high indeed.
Much general insurance will not cope with these issues. Assessing your risk profile and ensuring that you have the appropriate professional and business operational insurances in place is a specialised task.
There are specialist providers of dental surgery insurance who can help protect you by covering these sometimes hard-to-place risks. Contrary to popular myth, they are not fixated on ‘the selling’. If you look for one of the larger companies in this field that offers consultation and advice, you will be able to obtain a quick and free ‘check-up’ on the status of your cover.
It may be that in fact you are already adequately covered and have no further need for specialist dental surgery insurance. If that’s the case you will be able to sleep a little more easily. If not and you have identified shortcomings in your cover, you can at least then decide what your options are. It may be worth thinking about.
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If you work from home, you may benefit from taking out business home insurance. You may have standard home insurance for your contents, however in many cases this will not extend to your home office equipment. You should also check with your home insurance provider as you may find that your insurance policy is invalid unless you have told them you work from home. If you take out specialist contents insurance for your business, you may not be at risk if the worst should happen and you were to lose everything. So what does this insurance typically cover in your home office?
- Contents insurance for your business may in general cover anything in your home that you need to run your business. You may have protection against equipment being stolen, damaged or destroyed.
- Along with insuring business equipment in your home, the policy may usually also cover stock that you keep on the premises. If you have a substantial amount of stock in your home which adds up to a considerable amount of money then having this insurance may be a great relief as without it you may have to replace all the stock that was damaged, destroyed or stolen, yourself.
- When taking out insurance for your stock and equipment you may have to work out how much protection you need. This may of course be based on how much everything adds up so an inventory should be taken and you may then insure for this amount. This is then the sum of money paid back to you in the event you were to have to make a claim.
- You may also have to choose the level of insurance you need. In some cases you may be able to take a policy that may replace new for old or you may choose a policy that will consider depreciation. New for old of course means that the current market price is taken into account at the time of claiming. Depreciation takes into account how long you have had equipment and the cover may but not always work out cheaper.
Whenever you shop around for your business home insurance, you may want to ensure that you have checked the policy over thoroughly so you know exactly what you are getting for your money. The small print is where you may find limits and exclusions that may have an effect on your claim.