Soft Strip Contractor Insurance

Every soft strip contractor working in older buildings will encounter asbestos, and the question is only whether it is identified before it is disturbed.

A refurbishment and demolition survey should exist before you start, and the first thing worth doing is reading it rather than filing it. Where it is absent, incomplete or based on a management survey rather than a refurbishment one, the right answer is to stop and say so in writing. Textured coatings, floor tiles, bitumen adhesives, insulating board around services and asbestos cement in roofs and soffits are all routine finds in buildings of a certain age.

Insurance-wise the position is simple and unforgiving: your general policy excludes it. So either the work stops and a contractor whose cover contemplates asbestos handles it, or you hold cover for the specific categories you genuinely handle. What does not work is carrying on and hoping, because a disturbance claim is both uninsured and a regulatory matter.

The second exposure is one most policies were never written around: you have deliberately opened a building that somebody still owns.

A removed roof light, a stripped external wall or a disconnected rainwater system means the next heavy week of weather goes inside. Because gradual damage is excluded on most wordings, a slow ingress over a fortnight is a far harder claim than a single storm event, and the client's loss is damage to retained finishes and a delayed programme. Temporary weatherproofing, and a record of when it went up, is both the control and the evidence.

Security is the other half. A stripped building with exposed copper, cable and fittings attracts metal theft, and an empty building attracts occupation. Hoarding, boarding, lighting and a recorded inspection routine are often policy conditions once a building is unoccupied, and they are worth confirming rather than assuming.

Strip out generates more disputes about pre-existing damage than almost any other trade, and the contractor without photographs loses them.

You are working hard against surfaces that have to survive: floors, columns, ceilings, facades, stairwells and lift cores. Some of them were already marked, cracked or stained before you arrived, and the client will not remember which. Once the building is stripped, everything is visible for the first time in decades and all of it looks like damage.

So photograph everything before the first day, systematically and dated, including the access route and the lift you will be using. Then photograph again at completion. It takes a morning and it is the difference between a negotiation and a deduction. Where a main contractor provides a schedule of condition, read it and add to it rather than accepting it.

A great many soft strip contractors are insured as either demolition contractors or general builders, and both descriptions mis-price the work.

Rated as demolition, you pay for an exposure you do not have: no structural collapse, no explosives, no heavy plant bringing a building down. Rated as general building, you get a policy that says nothing useful about asbestos, nothing about a retained structure you are working against, and nothing about an opened envelope. Neither is a saving.

The right description is the work itself, with the asbestos position stated and the retained structure treated as third party property. It is a referral rather than an instant quote, and it produces a policy that answers the claims this trade actually has.

The common failure here is being rated as something adjacent rather than as what you do. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.