Crane Hire and Lifting Operations Insurance

Everything else in crane hire insurance sits behind one question, and it needs answering before every job rather than after an incident.

On a contract lift, the crane business plans the operation, appoints the person responsible for it, assesses the ground and the load, and takes responsibility for the lifting operation as a whole. On crane hire with operator, the crane and the driver are supplied to the hirer, who provides the appointed person, plans the lift and directs the operation, and who therefore carries it. The site looks the same either way. The difference only becomes visible in the documents.

The practical failure is routine: a verbal enquiry, a rate agreed on a phone call, a crane sent, and nobody certain which basis applies. Or terms that say crane hire while the crane firm has in fact done all the planning and told the hirer where to stand, which is a contract lift in substance whatever the paperwork says. So confirm the basis in writing for every job before the crane moves, make sure the basis matches what your people will actually do on site, and never let a planner help out on a hire job in a way that quietly converts it.

Ask anybody who has investigated a crane overturn and the answer is rarely the machine. It is what the machine was standing on.

Outrigger pressures are very high and concentrated. The failure modes are a pad placed over a buried drain, a chamber or a basement, ground that was made up and never compacted, a surface that looked solid after a dry week and was saturated beneath, a crane set up near an excavation that then slipped, and mats that were too small for the load. The crane does not fail; the ground gives way under one corner and the whole machine goes, usually with the load swinging.

So the ground assessment is the safety case and the record is the defence. On a contract lift it is yours: ground bearing confirmed rather than assumed, services and voids identified, mats specified for the actual pressures, and the set up position agreed. On crane hire it is the hirer's, and the protection is a written request for ground bearing information and a record of what was provided, plus an operator who will refuse to set up on something that looks wrong. That refusal needs to be supported by the business rather than argued with.

There is an exposure here that is legal rather than physical, and it catches tower crane work in particular.

A tower crane slews, and in an urban setting the jib will pass over neighbouring buildings and land. Doing that without an oversailing agreement is a trespass, and a neighbour who objects can seek an injunction that stops the crane and the project with it. Even with agreement, the neighbour's consent usually comes with conditions about hours, loads over their property and insurance requirements. Mobile cranes have a smaller version of the same problem when a boom reaches across a boundary or a highway.

So the commercial and legal groundwork matters as much as the lift plan. Establish whether oversailing agreements are in place and who obtained them before planning a crane position, record what the agreement permits, and treat its conditions as operating instructions rather than paperwork. Highway and rail proximity add their own permissions and possession arrangements. On a contract lift these are your problem; on a hire basis they are the hirer's, which is another reason the basis has to be settled first.

An exposure that is easy to overlook because it is not your property and not your machine.

What a crane lifts is frequently somebody else's: a transformer, a chiller, a module, a vessel, a piece of production plant, a bridge beam. Those items can be worth considerably more than the crane lifting them, they may have long lead times, and dropping one stops a project rather than damaging a component. On a contract lift, damage to the load is squarely within what you have taken on. On crane hire it may not be, but the hirer will still look at the crane firm.

So two things need checking rather than assuming. Whether your policy covers damage to the goods being lifted, which is usually a specific extension with its own limit rather than part of general liability, and whether that limit reflects the most valuable thing you lift rather than an average. Then recovery: getting an overturned crane off a site, and off whatever it landed on, is a substantial operation costing a great deal on its own, and it is a separate head of loss from the machine.

Only one question really matters first. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.