What Are Common Public Liability Insurance Claims for Tradesmen?

Which public liability claims come up most often on trade jobs?

Six categories account for most trade claims: water damage, fire and heat, impact damage to property or vehicles, injury to clients and the public, damage next door, and trips caused by your kit or your materials.

The six categories worth knowing

Grouping claims this way is more useful than a list of stories. Each category has its own trigger, its own escalation path and its own set of trades that carry the exposure.

Nobody in the UK publishes reliable frequency or settlement data for trade public liability claims, so treat any page quoting an average claim value with suspicion. What can be described honestly is the mechanism.

Why the cheap-looking ones still matter

A scratched worktop feels like something you would settle out of your own pocket. The problem is that you rarely know the replacement cost before you agree to pay it.

Settling privately also removes your insurer from a conversation it is better at having. That is the argument for holding £2 million of cover rather than the minimum and using it when something goes wrong.

How do water damage claims happen on a job?

Water damage claims usually come from an isolation valve left open, a joint that fails after you leave, or a roof opened up before the weather turned. Water then spreads well beyond the room you were working in.

• Isolation valves left open or reopened by someone else.
• Joints that weep slowly overnight rather than bursting.
• Fixings driven into concealed pipework and underfloor heating.
• Roofs and openings left exposed before bad weather.

The classic escape of water

A plumber reinstates a bathroom, tests it, and the compression joint weeps overnight. By morning the ceiling below has come down and the flat underneath has a claim too.

Escape of water is the category insurers see most from wet trades, because a small leak running unattended for hours does more damage than a large one spotted in minutes. Timing matters more than volume.

Water claims from trades that are not plumbers

A drill bit through a concealed pipe is a water claim, not a drilling claim. The same goes for a screw into underfloor heating or a nail through a cold feed in a stud wall.

Roofs are the other route in. A roofer who strips a section and leaves it sheeted before heavy rain can flood a loft, a stairwell and everything below it.

Insurers look hard at whether the temporary protection was reasonable for the forecast. Photographs of how you left the site at the end of the day are worth taking every time.

What causes fire and heat damage claims?

Hot works cause most of them. Blowtorches, angle grinders, hot air guns and bitumen boilers can leave a smouldering ignition source that only takes hold after you have packed up and gone.

• Blowtorches and soldering on pipework in floor voids.
• Grinder and cutting sparks travelling further than expected.
• Hot air guns on paint near old timber and insulation.
• Newly energised circuits with a loose or dirty termination.

Hot works and the hour after you finish

Insurer hot work permit conditions, such as those Allianz publishes, ask for a continuous fire watch for at least an hour after work stops. Checks then continue at intervals of no more than 20 minutes for a further hour.

The same conditions clear combustibles within 10 metres, including the floors above and below, and ask that hot work stops at least two hours before the end of the shift. Break those conditions and the insurer has grounds to decline.

Electrical faults and newly energised circuits

An electrician who energises a circuit with a loose termination has created a heat source that may take days to declare itself. Fire damage claims of this kind often arrive long after the invoice is paid.

Fire spreads the claim across a whole building rather than one room, which is why this category sits at the severe end even though it comes up less often than water.

Site fire risk is covered in HSE construction guidance, which is worth reading alongside your own policy conditions rather than instead of them.

How does a tradesman end up damaging a vehicle or a neighbour’s property?

Usually by something leaving your control: a dropped tool, a scaffold board, a paint mist, a reversing van or debris off a roof. Cars parked on a driveway are the single most exposed object on most domestic jobs.

Cars, vans and everything parked nearby

A dropped hammer that catches a bonnet or a windscreen is a routine claim, and modern vehicle panels and sensors are not cheap to put right. Neither are alloy wheels touched by a stray grinder disc.

A window cleaner whose pole knocks a wing mirror and a painter and decorator whose overspray drifts across three cars are dealing with the same head of claim.

Damage that lands next door

A tree surgeon dropping a limb into a neighbour’s conservatory is the obvious version. Vibration cracking a party wall during breaking out is the version people forget.

The neighbour has no contract with you and no relationship to protect, so these claims tend to go formal faster than a claim from your own client. They also tend to arrive weeks later, once the damage is noticed.

What happens when a client or member of the public is injured?

Injury claims are the ones that reach the top of an indemnity limit. Treatment costs sit alongside lost earnings, care and rehabilitation, which is why a serious injury claim behaves nothing like a property claim.

Injuries to people living in the property

A client who steps into a lifted floorboard, catches a hand on an unguarded edge or is hit by something falling from a stepladder has a direct route to a claim against you. Their age and their occupation both affect the size of it.

You do not have to have been careless in an obvious way. If the hazard existed because of your work, liability usually follows.

Injuries to people outside the property

Passers-by, delivery drivers and children are all third parties. A plasterer loading a skip on a pavement is exposed to the public in a way that indoor work is not.

Injury to your own staff is a different policy. That is employers’ liability, which is compulsory from the day you take anyone on.

Which claims start with a trip hazard you created?

Trailing leads, hoses, offcuts, lifted flooring and rucked dust sheets. These claims are hard to defend because the hazard was not there before you arrived and would not have been there if you had cleared up.

Cables, hoses and offcuts

An extension lead across a hallway is the most claimed-against object in domestic trade work. It is also the easiest hazard in the world to remove.

Working in an occupied house means people who are not watching for your kit will walk through it. Older clients and small children raise both the likelihood and the value.

Wet floors, dust and temporary surfaces

A mopped floor, a sanded stair nosing or a temporary ply covering all change how a surface behaves underfoot. Clients read the floor as normal because it is their own house.

Dust claims are their own category. Disturbing material in an older property brings HSE asbestos duties into play, and most policies exclude asbestos liability outright.

How do claims for damage to a client’s belongings arise?

Through contact, contamination and transport. Furniture moved to one side of a room, floors walked over in site boots and units carried up a staircase account for most of them.

• Contact damage from tools, boots, ladders and materials.
• Contamination from dust, paint, adhesive and solvent.
• Transport damage to doorframes, banisters and stair walls.

Furnishings, floors and fitted units

Solid timber floors, stone worktops and fitted wardrobes are the items clients care about most and the items least likely to be repairable in place. A partial match is often refused.

Protecting a room properly before you start costs an hour. Replacing a floor because dust sheets slipped costs considerably more than the job pays.

High-value items you did not know were there

Art, instruments, rugs and collections rarely announce themselves. A client will tell you a piece was valuable only after it has been knocked.

Ask before you start and get anything fragile moved out. Higher-value properties are also the ones whose contracts ask for £5 million of public liability cover rather than the domestic standard.

Which claims will public liability refuse to pay?

Redoing your own defective work, damage to your own tools and property, injury to your own employees, gradual pollution and claims about your advice all sit outside a public liability policy.

Your own workmanship and your own property

Public liability pays for the harm your work causes to other people and their property. It does not pay to put right the work itself.

If the claim is about a design, a specification or advice rather than physical damage, it belongs to professional indemnity, which is a separate policy with a different trigger.

Pollution, hired plant and employee injury

Public liability responds to a sudden, identifiable, unintended and unexpected incident. Gradual pollution, cleaning up your own site and your own defence costs in a regulatory matter usually sit outside it.

In Bartoline v RSA in 2006 an Environment Agency clean-up bill of £770,000 was refused because it was a statutory debt rather than damages. That case is the reason the Bartoline extension exists at all.

Hired-in plant is another gap. Under clause 13(b) of the CPA Model Conditions the hirer makes good loss or damage to the plant from whatever cause, fair wear and tear aside, regardless of fault.

What should you do in the first 48 hours after an incident?

Record what happened, tell your insurer straight away, and stop talking about fault. Admitting liability at the scene can prejudice the claim your policy is meant to answer.

• Photograph the damage and the wider scene before anything is moved.
• Note the time, the weather and who was present.
• Keep permits, method statements and delivery notes together.
• Notify the insurer the same day, and say nothing about fault.

Record it before anyone argues about it

Photograph the damage, the surrounding area and the state of the job. Note the time, who was present and what was said.

Keep the delivery notes, the method statement and any permit paperwork. Insurers ask for exactly these documents when hot works or work at height is involved.

Tell the insurer, not the claimant

Every policy carries a notification condition, and late notification is one of the few grounds an insurer can use to reduce or decline a payout. Report it even if you think the client will let it go.

Your insurer handles the correspondence and the defence costs from there. That defence is half of what you are buying, as employers’ liability and public liability compared sets out for each policy.

The ABI points out that public liability is not legally compulsory for tradesmen, so the pressure to hold it comes from clients and contracts instead.