Cladding and Insulation Contractors Insurance

Across the 11 cladding contracting policies on our book, most fall between £2,266 and £5,139 a year, with the middle sitting around £3,509. We quote the range rather than the cheapest policy we have ever placed, because the very lowest is always an outlier and tells you nothing about your own business. These are premiums arranged for other firms, not a quote for yours.

What moves the price is the same in every trade: turnover, how many people work under your direction, the work you take on, and your claims record. We are a broker, so we take it to several insurers rather than quoting one. Call 02382 000820 for a realistic figure.

Professional indemnity works on a claims made basis. The policy that answers a claim is the one in force when the claim arrives, not the one you held when you did the work. So whoever insures you now inherits everything you have ever fixed to a building.

That is why the most valuable document in a cladding submission is a project list going back years: what system, which manufacturer, what building, what height, what use. A clean documented history is genuinely worth money. A vague one usually ends in a decline, not because anybody thinks the worst, but because nobody can price what they cannot see.

Most markets exclude combustible panel types outright, and many stop at a stated building height, with residential treated more strictly than commercial. These behave as switches rather than dials: above the line there is no cover rather than dearer cover.

So the threshold in your wording has to match the work you actually take, and it has to match before you sign the contract. Remediation is the other thing to be clear about: policies answer for damage and for legal liability, not for the cost of bringing a building up to a standard.

Cavity barriers control fire spread behind a rainscreen, and missing or badly fitted ones are among the most common findings on surveyed buildings. Once the panels are on, nobody can see whether they were right.

Photograph them before they are covered. Keep the specification you were given, who approved it, the data sheets for what actually went on, and a note of any substitution and who authorised it. In this trade liability surfaces years later, and those photographs are frequently the only thing standing between a defensible position and an assumed one.

If a building you worked on is being surveyed, or you have had a notification, that has to be disclosed and it will normally be excluded from any new policy. Not disclosing it is worse, because it puts the whole policy at risk rather than one building.

What we can do is help you present the rest of the book properly, so the difficulty attaches to the specific project rather than to your entire history. That is a real distinction and it decides whether cover is available at all.

Do not let cover lapse while you shop around either, because a gap in a claims made history is very hard to repair. Call 02382 000820 early.