Employers’ Liability Insurance

Up to £2,500 for any day on which the business is without suitable insurance. It is charged per day rather than once, which is what turns a renewal that quietly lapsed into a serious number. A separate fine of up to £1,000 applies to failures involving the certificate.

The legal minimum is £5 million. In practice most UK insurers write at least £10 million as standard, and contracts with main contractors, local authorities or large customers often specify a figure of their own. A schedule showing the bare minimum is worth a question, because it is the floor rather than the market norm.

The Act is written around a contract of service or apprenticeship. The UK wording read for this page is wider, reaching people on work experience schemes, people supplied to you, hired in or borrowed, and self-employed people working under your direct control. Read your own definition rather than assuming.

It depends which kind. A labour-only subcontractor works under your direction, sits on your policy and belongs in your wage roll declaration. A bona fide subcontractor runs their own business and carries their own cover, so they should not be on yours, but collect their certificate: if their policy does not answer, the exposure can come back to you.

Usually not. A limited company with a single employee who also holds half or more of the share capital is exempt, as are businesses that are not limited companies where every employee is a close family member. Check the shareholding rather than assuming, and remember the exemption ends the day you take somebody on.

Often you do not need anything extra. HSE says that in some cases no additional employers’ liability insurance is needed for volunteers, unpaid students, people on training programmes or school work experience, and that an existing policy will cover work placements where the insurer belongs to the Association of British Insurers or Lloyd’s. Check your own wording, and ask if the arrangement is unusual.

No, and this is widely misreported. HSE states that since 1 October 2008 there has been no legal requirement for employers to keep copies of out-of-date certificates. HSE does strongly advise keeping as complete a record as possible, because work-related diseases can appear decades after the exposure that caused them.

Yes. In Great Britain that has been allowed since 1 October 2008, and in Northern Ireland since 1 April 2009 under its own amending regulations. The condition is practical rather than technical: employees have to know how and where to find it, and have reasonable access to it. A file on an intranet nobody has been told about does not meet it.

Failing to display the certificate, or refusing to make it available to an inspector who asks, carries a fine of up to £1,000. It is a separate obligation from holding the insurance itself, and it is easy to overlook: a common version is simply that the current certificate never replaced last year’s on the wall.

Because it is how an old policy is found. Insurers have supplied employers’ liability policy data to the industry tracing database since 1 April 2011, and capturing the reference with it became mandatory from 1 April 2012. Company names and addresses change over the decades; the reference does not, so it is what makes a policy findable when a claim arrives years later.

Some employers legitimately have none, and it is a declaration rather than a problem. The recognised case is that every employee is paid below the current Lower Earnings Limit, none has another job, and none receives a state or occupational pension or other employee benefits. Companies registered in the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands have none either. Tell the broker so the exemption is recorded.

The Employers’ Liability Tracing Office, set up by the insurance industry in 2011. It is a searchable database of employers’ liability policies holding more than forty million records spanning over a century, and it is free to search. It exists so an old policy can be found when a late claim is made.

Because employers’ liability is long-tail cover. Conditions caused by work, particularly those from dust, noise or chemical exposure, can take decades to appear. The claim is answered by the policy that was in force when the exposure happened rather than the one you hold now, which is why the record of past insurers matters.

Employers’ liability covers injury and illness suffered by the people who work for you, and is compulsory. Public liability covers injury to members of the public and damage to their property, and is not compulsory, although customers and contracts frequently require it. A business with both staff and visitors is exposed to both, and the two are commonly bought together.

Not automatically, and it is worth checking before anyone travels. The wording read for this page covers work in the home territories, meaning Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, and extends to temporary work abroad on condition that any action for compensation is brought in a court within those territories. Longer postings and locally engaged staff normally need cover arranged specifically.

Directly, because wage roll split by category of work is the main rating base for employers’ liability. Leaving out labour-only subcontractor payments understates it, and that is found at audit or at the claim rather than at the quote. Declare the estimate properly and tell the insurer if the year turns out very differently.

It can be, but it is commonly bought inside a package alongside public liability, property and business interruption. If that is how your business buys it, a commercial combined policy is what to compare rather than employers’ liability on its own.