HGV Fleet Insurance

There is no single market answer and we will not invent one. Insurers set their own minimum, and the threshold that matters is the one on the quote in front of you rather than a figure quoted on a comparison page. Where the vehicle count is the whole question, our mini fleet insurance page deals with it directly.

If you use a goods vehicle over 3.5 tonnes gross plated weight, or over 1,525kg unladen where there is no plated weight, to carry goods for hire or reward or in connection with a trade or business, yes. The Traffic Commissioners regulate this in Great Britain and the Department for Infrastructure does in Northern Ireland. Which type you hold tells an underwriter what the operation does.

Yes, and more than operators expect. Alongside the vehicles and drivers, underwriters look at licence standing and the compliance history behind it. The DVSA maintains an Operator Compliance Risk Score built from a roadworthiness strand and a traffic strand, and it is banded by risk.

The Operator Compliance Risk Score. It combines roadworthiness, from inspections and the prohibitions that follow, with traffic, from roadside checks and prosecutions covering drivers’ hours, tachograph offences and weighing. Bands run green, amber and red for risk, blue for DVSA Earned Recognition, and grey where there has been no interaction and no score. You can read your own through the vehicle operator licensing service.

Events remain in the score for three years, with reduced weighting in the second and third years. That works both ways: a poor year keeps influencing the score after it has ended, and improvements take time to show through. It is a reason to treat compliance work as a multi-year investment rather than a renewal exercise.

It depends what you mean by covered. On the wordings read for this page, liability to other people while towing follows the towing vehicle and does not require the trailer to be specified. Damage to the trailer itself is the part that does: it is insured separately, and only where the trailer is on the schedule.

Cover for damage to the trailer narrows, and the wordings differ. One insures a specified trailer while attached or temporarily detached during the course of a journey. Another extends it to a trailer on or close to your premises while it remains in your care, custody and control. A trailer left somewhere that is neither is the gap to ask about.

For injury, yes. For property damage, no. Third party injury cover on a UK motor policy has no monetary limit. Damage to other people’s property is capped at the figure on your schedule, and at forty-four tonnes that figure is what decides a bridge strike or a demolished building. It is worth knowing what yours is.

No. Goods carried in or on the vehicle are excluded from the motor policy. They belong to goods in transit cover, which is a separate contract, and what you owe for a lost load is capped by the conditions of carriage the job was accepted under.

Usually less than the customer thinks, and that is the point of the conditions. Under the Road Haulage Association conditions the cap is the lesser of the value of the goods, the cost of replacing or repairing them, and £1,300 per tonne on the gross weight of the goods actually lost, mis-delivered or damaged. A light but valuable consignment is the case that bites.

Only if they were properly incorporated into the contract before the job started. Accepting work on a customer’s terms instead can leave you carrying a liability the standard conditions would have capped. It is worth checking how your jobs are actually accepted rather than what your website says.

Where goods are carried for reward and collection and delivery are in different countries, the CMR convention applies in place of domestic conditions, with its own liability rules. It does not cover everything, and postal carriage, funerals and furniture removals sit outside it. If part of the fleet runs abroad, separate that work on the submission.

Not for the EU and EEA. Since 2 August 2021 UK drivers and operators have not needed one there, and many haulage pages still say otherwise. Green cards do still exist and are still required for some countries outside that area, including Albania, Moldova, Türkiye and Ukraine, so check your actual destinations rather than assuming either way.

Usually yes, and it is a common reason operators move to fleet cover. A schedule can carry different vehicle types and the arrangement is normally described as a mixed fleet. Rating still follows each vehicle, so a van added to an HGV fleet is not rated as a lorry.

Several, on the fleet wordings we have read. They commonly state that the excess applies to each vehicle separately where more than one is involved in the same incident. Ask your broker whether a single event or aggregate excess clause is available, particularly before agreeing a higher voluntary excess.

No. Injury to your own drivers and staff is employers’ liability, which is a separate policy and compulsory for almost every UK business with employees. The motor policy answers for injury to other people, not to the people who work for you.

A vehicle schedule with weights and values, every trailer specified, details of the drivers and their licence categories, the operating centres, what you carry and over what radius, and three to five years of claims experience. The claims experience has to come from your current insurer, so ask for it early.