Plasterers and Dryliners Insurance

Cover for a sole trader plasterer on public liability alone starts at £90 a year. That is the entry point rather than the average: one person, liability only, with nothing for tools, employees or the job itself. Employ anyone and employers' liability becomes a legal requirement, and from there the price is driven by wageroll and by the work you take on rather than by the trade.

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.

By the time plastering starts, floors are down, joinery is in, and what you are standing on is somebody else's finished work. Almost everything that goes wrong in this trade is damage to that rather than to anything of yours.

It arrives three ways: water off a mixer or a board, dust through a building somebody is still using, and the ordinary knocks of carrying boards and towers through finished rooms. One point applies to all of them. The room you are actually working in may sit outside cover, because a policy treats what is in your immediate charge differently from third party property, so the boundary is not always where you would guess.

A fire resisting wall works because of the exact combination of board, layers, fixings, joint treatment and sealing at every junction and service penetration. Get one of those wrong and the wall does not do what the drawing says it does.

The awkward part comes later, when following trades cut through it and nobody seals it back up. If you specify or make detailing decisions yourself, that is a professional activity and commercial fit out subcontracts increasingly ask for professional indemnity by name. Installing strictly to somebody else's drawing is a much lighter exposure.

Ordinary render is ordinary render. Render applied over external wall insulation forms part of the building's external wall, and since the market repriced everything to do with external walls, insurers look at it very differently, including height restrictions.

If any part of your work is render over insulation, tell us at the outset. Describing it all as rendering is the kind of thing that reads as non-disclosure later, and it is easily avoided.

What moves a plasterer's renewal is rarely one big loss. It is a run of small ones, because a pattern reads to an underwriter as a process that is not working, where a single accident reads as bad luck.

What breaks the pattern is being able to describe a process: sheeting finished floors before you start, sealing the room before you cut, photographing it at handover. That last one settles a surprising number of arguments before they ever become claims.

Worth knowing too, the ones you settled yourself still count. Paying for a damaged floor out of your own pocket is sensible right up until a proposal form asks about incidents rather than claims, so tell us about those as well. They are far easier to explain at the outset than after an insurer finds one. If your premium has climbed year on year without a single big loss, that is worth a phone call. 02382 000820.