Petrol Station and Forecourt Insurance

The loss that most threatens a forecourt business is not a fire. It is a slow leak nobody noticed.

Fuel stored underground escapes into soil and then into groundwater, which spreads, reaches neighbouring land and in some cases a watercourse or a supply. Remediation means investigation, excavation, soil removal, long term monitoring and sometimes work on somebody else's property, and the cost can exceed the value of the site. The causes are well understood: an ageing single skin tank, corroded steel pipework, a failed line joint, a dispenser leak, and a loss that wastage figures should have revealed but did not because nobody reconciled them properly.

So the controls are detection and integrity, and they are what cover depends on. Wet stock reconciliation done properly and investigated when it drifts rather than explained away, line and tank integrity testing at intervals, leak detection and interstitial monitoring where fitted actually monitored, and a planned view on tank and line replacement rather than running them until something happens. Then the wording: establish whether gradual pollution is covered as well as sudden, because a slow leak is the gradual kind and many policies exclude exactly that.

A forecourt is the only retail environment where untrained members of the public handle a flammable liquid as a matter of routine.

Customers fill their own vehicles while standing in a vapour zone, with engines running nearby, mobile phones in hand, children in cars, and vehicles manoeuvring around the pump islands. The recognised incidents are a fire at a dispenser, a spill from an overfill or a driving away with the nozzle still attached, a slip on a wet or fuel contaminated surface, and a vehicle striking a pump or a pedestrian. Tanker deliveries add a period when a large volume is being transferred while the site is still trading.

So the controls are supervision and surface condition. Forecourt supervision from the kiosk with the ability to cut dispensers remotely and the willingness to use it, trained staff who intervene on smoking or engines running rather than watching, spill kits and absorbent available and used immediately, surfaces maintained because fuel on worn concrete is a slip claim, bollards and protection to pump islands, and a delivery procedure that keeps customers away from the tanker. Insurers ask about all of it, and a site that can describe its delivery supervision is answering the question properly.

Most forecourts now make more margin from the shop than from the fuel, and the shop carries a conventional retail risk at an unconventional hour.

A forecourt shop holds tobacco and vaping stock, alcohol, food to go and a till, is open long hours and frequently through the night, and is a target precisely because it is open when everything else is shut. The exposures are a ram raid or shutter attack, a robbery while a single member of staff is on duty, repeated distraction theft, and underage sales of alcohol and tobacco which are a licensing matter rather than a claim. Cash builds up overnight unless it is banked or dropped.

So the shop needs insuring as a shop rather than as an adjunct to the fuel. Separate money limits understood for till, safe, out of hours and transit, tobacco and vaping stock declared and its overnight position addressed, a time delay or drop safe for night trading, an age verification policy applied to everybody near the threshold with refusals logged, and CCTV covering the till and the forecourt with retention. Then lone working, because a single person on a night shift with cash, fuel and alcohol is the exposure insurers ask about first.

Fuel taken without payment is the loss a forecourt experiences most often, and it is largely not an insurance matter.

A drive off, or a customer who claims to have no means of payment, happens continuously at most sites, and the individual amounts are small while the annual total is not. Most policies exclude it or sub-limit it heavily, because it is a volume loss driven by operations rather than an insured event. That makes it a management problem: the tools are pre-authorisation, forecourt supervision with the ability to refuse to authorise a pump, number plate recognition linked to a recovery service, staff trained to record details properly, and a policy on no means of payment that is applied consistently.

It is worth being clear with a broker about the scale of it, not because insurance will solve it but because it affects how the rest of the cover is arranged. A site with a serious drive off problem usually has a supervision issue, and that same issue affects the fire, spill and theft exposures. Insurers reading a proposal form see the drive off figure as information about how the forecourt is run rather than as a claim to be priced.

Gradual pollution is the clause that decides it. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.