Steeplejack and Chimney Contractor Insurance

It is worth knowing the mechanics, because it stops a week being wasted on comparison sites.

A rating engine takes a trade description and a working height. Steeplejacking trips the height limit before anything else is considered, and hand demolition trips a second exclusion, so the decline comes back in seconds and comes back identically from a dozen places. Nothing about your crew, your certification or your thirty year claims record has been looked at.

The work is placed instead with insurers who write specialist height work on purpose, and that is a referral rather than a quotation. It needs the submission: who your people are and what they hold, your access methods, your rigging and inspection regime, your exclusion zone arrangements, the types of structure you work on and your claims history. That takes days rather than minutes and it produces a policy that actually permits the work.

Every steeplejack arrives at a structure somebody is worried about, and that creates the characteristic dispute.

A Victorian stack with failing bands, a spire with loose stonework, a tower with spalled brickwork. You are there precisely because it is deteriorating. Then something moves during the work, or a section comes away, and the question is whether your work caused it or whether it was already going. Years of weathering and a day of your scaffold cannot easily be separated after the event.

So the survey record is the asset. Photograph comprehensively before touching anything, at close range from the access rather than from the ground, and document every defect you can see with a position reference. Where a client declines recommended work on cost grounds, record it. And where a structure is in a condition that makes the requested work unsafe or inadvisable, say so in writing and decline rather than proceeding, because a collapse on a listed structure is a claim nobody wants to be defending.

Height alone is manageable. Height over something you cannot move is what shapes this trade.

A church spire sits over a roof, a graveyard and often a path the public use. An industrial stack sits inside a working site with plant, vehicles and people. A mill chimney in a town sits over roads and neighbouring buildings. Masonry falling eighty metres arrives with enough energy to go through a roof, and a fatality is a realistic rather than a theoretical outcome.

Which makes the exclusion zone the central control and the central difficulty, because the people below are frequently not under your instruction: a congregation, a factory's own staff, the public on a footpath. Netting, fans, a controlled drop zone, a banksman whose only job is the ground, and agreement in writing with the client about closures and access. Where a client will not close a path or stop a process, that is the point to stop rather than to proceed carefully.

Damage to a modern building is a repair. Damage to a listed one is a project with a consent process attached.

Materials have to match: hand made brick, lime mortar, specific stone, sometimes salvaged. The work needs approval, and the approval takes time during which scaffolding stays up and a church or a building stays out of use. The cost of putting right a damaged section of a listed spire bears no relation to a modern equivalent, which is why the limit on this trade is set against the structure rather than against the contract value.

It also means the question of whether the structure counts as third party property or as the thing you were working on is unusually consequential. On a modern commercial job that distinction moves a claim between sections. Here it can decide whether a six figure conservation repair is covered at all, so it is worth establishing in writing before a contract rather than after an incident.

The first question is whether a broker can place the trade at all, and most cannot. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.