The delivery lorry drops off a hired excavator, the driver hands over the paperwork, and within seconds you are fully liable for a machine worth tens of thousands of pounds. Most contractors sign the hire ticket without reading the small print. The exposure only becomes clear when a machine is stolen overnight, damaged mid-job, or written off in a fire.
Continue reading “Plant Hire Insurance Explained for UK Contractors”
You finish the project on time. The finish is good, the price is right, and an offer comes in within a fortnight. Then the buyer rings their insurer, mentions that the foundations were underpinned during the build, and the quote never arrives. Their lender will not release funds without buildings cover. The sale stalls, then dies. Continue reading “Insurance for Underpinned Houses: A Developer’s Guide”
Only around a third of construction products sold in the UK are currently covered by a proper safety standard. The rest sit in a grey area, tested against trade rules rather than safety rules, and often carrying marks that look official but were never designed to prove a product is safe to use. Continue reading “Construction Products Reform: Know Your Risk Before It Costs You”
The digger arrives. The first cut goes into the ground. From that moment, everything below the surface becomes unpredictable.
Groundworks is where a project turns from paper into reality, and it’s also where risk becomes hardest to control. Generic construction insurance is usually built with finishing trades in mind, painters, plasterers, joiners. It rarely accounts for what happens when work moves underground. Continue reading “Insurance for Groundworks Contractors: What Standard Policies Miss”
Most homeowners assume their buildings insurance just keeps working in the background, no matter what they do to the property. Then a renovation starts, and that assumption gets tested.
Research from Alan Boswell Group found that 86% of property owners do not tell their insurer about work being carried out on their home, which puts their policy at risk of being voided. That is not a small oversight. It is the single most common reason a renovation ends up costing far more than the building work itself. Continue reading “House Insurance When Renovating”
A crack appears in the wall of a five-year-old new build. It runs along a load-bearing section, and no snagging inspection could have picked it up when the property was handed over. The fault was there from the start, hidden inside the structure, and it has only just become visible.
This is a latent defect. It is different from the scuffed paintwork or sticking door that gets flagged during a final walkthrough. Latent defects stay hidden until long after completion, sometimes for years, and when they surface the repair bill can be substantial. Continue reading “Latent Defects Insurance Explained: What It Covers and Who Pays”
The government has committed to 1.5 million new homes. Infrastructure spending is up. The order books of many contractors look healthier than they have in years. And yet construction has posted more insolvencies than any other UK industry four years in a row.
Nearly 4,000 firms collapsed in 2025. That figure was slightly down on 2024, but it sits 21.5% above pre-pandemic levels. The slight improvement is real. It is not, by any reasonable measure, a recovery. Continue reading “Construction Insolvencies Are Still Breaking Records”
Most contractors find out what their policy actually covers at the worst possible moment, when something has already gone wrong. A digger goes missing overnight. A storm rips through a half built roof. A passer-by trips over scaffolding poles left on the pavement. Suddenly the question isn’t “do I have insurance” but “does my insurance actually cover this”. Continue reading “What Does Construction Site Insurance Cover?”
A developer is halfway through a project when their solicitor flags a covenant buried in a 1958 conveyance. It limits the plot to a single dwelling. The new scheme has two. Work stops while everyone scrambles for answers.
This happens more often than most people in construction expect. Restrictive covenants sit quietly in title deeds for decades, then surface at exactly the wrong moment, during a sale, a planning application, or partway through a build. Continue reading “Restrictive Covenant Indemnity Insurance Costs and Cover Explained”
The question usually arrives at the worst possible moment. A buyer’s solicitor asks for it during a sale. A lender asks for it before releasing mortgage funds. A self-builder finds out, halfway through the project, that nobody has actually arranged it.
A structural warranty is one of those things that sits quietly in the background of a project until somebody specifically asks for proof of it, at which point it becomes urgent. By then, getting one can be slower and considerably more expensive than it needed to be. Continue reading “What Is a 10-Year Structural Warranty and Do You Need One”