What insurance do I actually need on a small building job?

Four policies, four different questions:

The four, and what each answers for

• Public liability answers for harm your work does to other people and their property: the scaffold clip through the neighbour’s conservatory, the flood into the flat below. Clients and sites demand it because it protects them; check the level demanded by the jobs you want, and the exclusions for the work you actually do, heat work and depth limits are the classic small print that turns a claim into a letter.
• Employers liability answers for injury to your people, and if you employ anyone, including much labour-only help, it is required by law, not optional. The status questions from the CIS page echo here: who counts as your employee is a fact pattern, not a label, and the wrong assumption uninsures exactly the person on your scaffold.
• Contract works / contractors all risks answers for the half-built thing itself: the extension the storm takes off, the materials stolen from site, the fire before handover. This is the one entangled with the contract, below, and it has its own page.
• Professional indemnity answers for design: advice and drawings that turn out wrong. If you build only what others design, your exposure is small; the moment you design-and-build, size the beam, spec the drainage, sign the building notice, PI stops being optional, and promises to maintain it live in warranty documents for years.

The two contract questions that decide the works cover

Who insures the works, in whose names, until when? Standard forms put it in the particulars: on new work typically the contractor insures until practical completion; on work to an existing house, typically the client’s buildings policy carries the existing structure while you cover your new works, and the client’s insurer has actually been told. That second half is the classic domestic gap: nobody tells the household insurer there is a builder in, the kitchen fire meets a policy with a works exclusion, and both sides discover the hole together. On a bare-quote job with no insurance clause at all, the gap is the default state, one more line the quote should carry.

And when does the risk pass? Completion, section completion, or the client moving in early, the uncertified occupation leaves the works cover genuinely ambiguous, which is one more reason that page tells you to force the date.

What this page deliberately does not cover

Premiums and limits, no honest general figures exist, get quotes; the decade-scale products, latent defects insurance has its own page and its own buyer, usually the client; and vehicle, plant hire and legal expenses covers, which your broker will map onto how you actually work. Nothing here varies with the client’s identity, insurance owes nothing to the Construction Act, except that domestic jobs are where the existing-structure gap lives.

What to do this week

1. Pull your schedules and check the four against your actual work: levels, heat and depth exclusions, the design question answered honestly.

2. On the live domestic job, confirm in writing who insures the existing structure and that their insurer knows the works are happening.

3. Put the insurance line into your quote template: what you carry, what the client carries, when risk passes.

Where the information stops

This is a broker’s subject and the page is a map, not advice: policy wordings differ where it matters, and an annual hour with a broker who knows construction, schedules on the table, is how the map becomes cover. The one thing to bring to that meeting is this page’s contract half, because the broker cannot see your contracts, and the gap lives between the two documents.