Public Liability Insurance and Small Business Cover
Insuring your business with the most appropriate insurance may be important to you. With a range of articles on small business cover including professional indemnity insurance, employers liability, public liability and trades insurance, we hope you find this website a useful resource.
Archive for the ‘Business Insurance’ Category
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.
.
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.
The building trade, as does any trade, comes with risks. Imagine for a second that you have taken on a building project and the worst should happen, a member of the public gets hurt and the blame is on you. While of course this may not have been intentional and you have strict safety measures in place, accidents do happen. In this case, you may be liable to pay out costs, and this is where builder insurance liability public protection may come into play.
What may liability insurance do for me?
With liability insurance behind you, you may have something to rely on towards paying the costs for damages, if the situation arose through your fault. Any member of the public may make a claim for damages if they occurred as the result of activities carried out by your business, which may include:
- Death
- Bodily injury
- Property damages
What may the insurance cover and payout for?
If there is a claim on your liability insurance, several things may typically be claimed for, including:
- Any legal fees
- Any expenses or costs
- The hiring of a representative, for example if you should have to attend a court hearing
Why should liability cover be considered?
If you own and run a building business, give some thought to where you may get the money from in the event the worst happened and someone should become incapacitated or worse as a result of something that related to your business. If you were taken to court and they claimed damages, for example for a broken limb, you may have to find money for a solicitor. If you did not have liability insurance to rely on, you may, in the worst case scenario, end up losing your business to pay for the costs.
How much insurance may I need for my business?
The amount of liability insurance you may need will depend on your business. If you shop online for your business insurance with a specialist insurance provider you may compare the cost of insurance as well as policy features and benefits in order to help keep the premiums down.
Small businesses are more vulnerable to financial liability claims as they can and do result in major financial loss or financial ruin, yet there are insurance solutions on offer that provide small businesses with protection, these are Public Liability Insurance, Employer Liability Insurance and Professional Indemnity.
Public Liability Insurance
This insurance offers protection against third party compensation claims. As a business owner you are vulnerable to third party claims arising from accidental injury, damage or loss to possessions and property and offers legal fees and expenses that may arise from these claims as well as the costs for hospital treatments, ambulance costs and any other medical costs that may be billed to you by the NHS.
This cover is intended for losses or damages to the public incurred by or as a result of visiting your business premises or whilst going about business related to your product or services, yet is also offers benefits that extends to your own personal loss, injury or damage whilst on the premises on another business.
Even though public liability insurance is typically not considered compulsory in the UK, you may find that many of your customers require proof that you are covered before they will allow you to conduct business with them.
Employer liability insurance
As an employer you are fully responsible for the health and safety of your employees during working hours. If any of your staff are injured at work they are entitled to claim compensation from you. Employees who fall ill as a result of the type of work they undertake and even those who have left your employment and later suffer illness as a result of the work they undertook whilst in your employ are also entitled to claim compensation.
Employees are regarded as anyone who works on your premises. In terms of employee contracts, these do not have to be in writing, a contract is deemed to exist when terms and conditions of employment have been mutually agreed, and so an employee can take the form of a permanent worker, part time worker, contract workers which include sub contractors, students, voluntary workers and those working on a trial basis or those undergoing probation.
Employer’s liability insurance is considered compulsory in the UK and you may be liable for heavy fines in the event that you are found negligent in this area or if you do not hold Employers Liability Insurance that compiles with the law. The only conditions where you may be exempt from Employers Liability Insurance is if you are the sole employee and you hold at least 50% share capital or if your employees are close relatives and your business is not incorporated as a limited company.
Professional Indemnity
If you provide professional services such as consultancy or design work, you may find you need Professional Indemnity. Professional Indemnity provides protection against any claims that have the potential to damage your reputation or those that may incur crippling financial implications or loss of business. Errors, omissions and even negligence on your part can result in a customer or clients filing a suit against you.
Professional indemnity covers you against such claims as well as claims that arise from employee theft and dishonesty towards your clients, such as stealing clients documentation, data, company identify or ideas or worse. If your business activities in anyway directly affect that of another person or business or if you are found infringing a clients copyrights or trademarks for instance, professional indemnity will provide the financial means you need to legally counteract their claims or if need be settle their claim.
These three liability covers may be the types of small business cover available that could address the issues of liability or compensation claims against you.
You might well ask the question whether or not your office setup is worth insuring, yet omitting office insurance from your monthly overheads may leave you facing unpredicted bills and sometimes these bills are very costly.
Whether you have a landlord you rent your premises from or if you own your own business premises, once you start operating you are susceptible to a variety of risks and liabilities, least of all are theft or damage to office equipment and today even small office environments rely on expensive equipment such as computers, telecommunications, office furniture and office equipment.
Office insurance will provide you with cover against theft and damage to items kept on your premises and will also offer you the option of an ‘all risks’ clause that will protect portable items such as tools, laptops and mobile phones.
Liabilities
Another potential risk any office environment faces are liabilities. Running a business bestows you with certain responsibilities toward your staff, your customers and at times even your products or services and if these liabilities progress to legal action you may be left out of pocket, perhaps even out of business.
- Number one on the list is public liability. Public liability insurance will cover you in the event that any of your clients, customers, members of the public and at times even intruders, suffer any injury, loss or damage to either their persons or possessions whilst in your office, or whilst going about your business.
If they claim fault against you this makes you liable for not only your own legal expenses but should they win their claim against you, you may be liable for their legal expenses over and above what you are required to pay them in compensation.
- Professional liability insurance may be necessary if your office based business involves professional services requiring specialist skills and specialist knowledge. What professional liability insurance offers you is cover against claims relating to negligence or errors in your work which result in financial losses for your clients.
- For any business owner, legal fees may be a tremendous burden and in order to fund legal defences or other legal actions there is a special insurance cover called Legal Fees Insurance. This insurance cover will indemnify you against the legal bills and other legal actions in the event of litigation.
- Even if you don’t employ many office staff, you are considered responsible for their health and safety, even death while in your employ. You may even be liable for fines for failing to arrange the appropriate insurance cover and these fines may be exceptionally costly and for this reason you may need to consider employers’ liability insurance cover.
Office insurance cover
Even the best run offices may be disrupted or crippled by unexpected events, and for this reason low costs packages are available that are able to protect you against loss, damage and liabilities and this is office insurance explained, in a nutshell.
Whether you have small or large business premises you may benefit from taking out business building insurance. This sort of cover can typically help in the event that your premises burnt down or were damaged to the extent that you may not continue running your business. If your business was damaged severely as the result of fire and you had to pay out of your own pocket for repairs that may run into thousands of pounds, would you have the funds to do so? If not, you may lose your business. With business insurance, you may be eligible to make a claim on the policy and not suffer financial loss.
Factors of the insurance you may want to consider
Generally when covering the building you have your business housed in you may be protected against damage caused by unexpected events such as fire etc. Cover can also sometime be extended to include subsidence. This type of basic insurance can typically be taken out by any type and any size of business. However, you may need to consider that this type of insurance is just taken out with the shell of the building in mind. An example of this may be if the structure of the building were damaged by fire along with the contents, stock and equipment. The policy may only payout for the damage to the actual building. If you wanted to protect the contents inside, along with your stock and equipment then you will usually have to add these in as extras to the policy.
Where might I take out insurance for the building?
When considering taking out business buildings insurance you do have choices and this may help you to keep down the cost of your insurance. If you choose a specialist insurance brokers website to compare the cost of insurance this may lead to a competitively priced policy that is suitable for your needs.
The cost of the insurance will based on many factors, including the potential rebuild cost. This may of course be based on a valuation as to how much it may cost to totally rebuild if the worst case scenario were to happen and the building burnt down to the ground.
Along with comparing the cost of your business building insurance, you may also need to consider the small print of any insurance policy you considering buying. The small print is where you may be able to find such as limitations on the amount that may be paid out and exclusions that may stop you from making a claim on your policy.
There are many different types of business insurance. so whatever type of trade you are in you should be able to find cover for your needs. Any business may benefit from having insurance to fall back onto including builders, publicans, restaurateurs and retailers, to name just a few. There are also different types of insurance based on your type of business and these will typically need to be considered when looking for a policy, as needs can differ.
If you are in the trade business then you may want to ensure that your insurance includes public liability insurance. This gives you protection in the event that a member of the public gets hurt due to something related to your business or on your premises. The insurance will help with legal costs if you are sued.
You will need to consider employers’ liability insurance. Typically a legal requirement in the UK (though there may be exceptions), this insurance may protect any of your workforce against injury or death that comes about due to them working for you.
If you own and run a public house, you may consider pub insurance for your business. Usually liability insurance may be included along with many other benefits, which you may have to check with the provider of your insurance. For instance, you may have cover for interruption of your business. This may, for instance, protect against the possibility of a fire that caused considerable damage to the business and it may not be open to the public. You may lose out a great deal of money if you lost takings for many months whilst repairs took place. If you had interruption insurance a claim may be made.
Insurance for your business may also cover the contents of your business. You may wish to check in the small print of the policy to find out if your insurance may pay out for theft by employees. While this might not be found in all business insurance, some providers may include it in with pub insurance.
If you are in the retail business, you may want to look into taking out retail insurance for your business. Along with public and employers liability, you might have protection for the shell of the building, the contents and your stock. You may also have insurance for goods in transit. This means that if you are delivering goods to customers and they are damaged or stolen the insurance company may payout. This may also provide protection in the event you were picking stock up to bring it back and it was stolen, damaged or destroyed.
These are just a few of the instances where business insurance may work hard for you. If you lost thousands of pounds of stock for example and you did not have insurance to fall back onto then you will typically lose a great deal of money.
Get a no obligation Business Insurance quote