Fencing and Gate Contractor Insurance

This is the single piece of advice in this trade that is worth more than any policy feature, and it costs nothing.

The customer points at a line. They are usually right and occasionally not, and they are rarely working from anything more authoritative than where the old fence was, which may itself have been in the wrong place for thirty years. If you build along a line that turns out to be over the boundary, the fence comes out, and the question of who pays is between you and the customer rather than you and an insurer.

So put it on the quote and the job sheet: the fence will be installed along the line indicated by the customer, the customer confirms this is the boundary, and verification of the legal boundary is not part of the work. Photograph the line as marked before you start. Where a neighbour is present and disagrees, stop and let the two of them resolve it rather than becoming the third party in their dispute.

Digging a hundred post holes along a boundary is a reliable way of finding out what is buried there.

The services that cause trouble are rarely the mains in the road. They are private ones: a water pipe to a garden tap, armoured cable to a garage or shed, an oil line to a tank, a soil pipe running to a shared drain, or a supply to a neighbouring property crossing a garden. None of them appears on a utility plan and all of them are typically shallow.

The controls are proportionate. A cable avoidance tool before the first hole, asking the customer specifically about garden power, water and oil runs and recording the answer, hand digging the first spit where anything is suspected, and stopping when something is found rather than pulling. Where a strike happens anyway, that record is what separates a defensible claim from a careless one.

A powered gate is the point at which a fencing business becomes a machinery installer, and it deserves to be treated as such.

Sliding and swing gates have crushing, shearing and trapping zones, and incidents involving them have killed people, including children. They are subject to safety requirements that involve force testing, safety edges or photocells, a risk assessment and documentation handed to the owner. An installation that skips those is not merely non-compliant; it is the kind of exposure that follows a business for years.

From the insurance side, declare it. A policy written for fencing may not contemplate powered gates at all, and where you supply the gate and the automation you have products liability on both. Keep the force test results and the handover documentation with the job file, because if there is ever an incident they are the first things requested and the only things that help.

Every fencing contractor gets the same call after the first proper gale of the autumn, and how it goes depends on what was agreed.

A new fence that comes down raises two questions: was it installed properly, and was the weather exceptional? Posts not concreted to depth, panels fixed into soft ground, or a close board fence put up with no gravel boards in an exposed position will fail in ordinary wind, and that is workmanship. A fence that survived three winters and goes over in a named storm is a different conversation.

Where this gets expensive is the damage rather than the fence: a panel through a car windscreen, a conservatory roof, or a neighbour's greenhouse. That is third party damage and public liability territory, and it is why the limit matters even on domestic work. Practically, specify the right post depth and fixings for the exposure, say so on the quote where a customer wants something cheaper, and photograph the completed work.

This trade gets quoted cheaply and generically, and the two things that matter are rarely asked about. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.