In 2012, not a lot has changed, in that the damage caused by the actual theft far outweighs the cost of the actual stolen lead. But, the difference is that the lead is a lot more expensive per kilo than it ever was. So are all other types of metal, it is not just the non-ferrous metals, nowadays any type of metal has a better value than ever before. This is why people have even taken to stealing metal drain covers from the streets.

The two problems, with the consequent cost, is that the thieves tend to damage the property when they are stealing the metal. Then, the actual property owners may not find out about the theft until such time as a lot of water suddenly starts appearing through a ceiling or floor. The theft of the roofing metal could have occurred many weeks before, it is not until the first major storm occurs that the real damage happens.

The question is, what can be done to prevent these losses? We have had one commercial property owner who have had three theft losses in the last three years. The total cost to insurers is going to be in excess of £100,000. Each claim has resulted in a roof being replaced with a zinc coated metal. The cost of this is much less than lead and the theft attractiveness is lower. But, the thieves do not always understand what is and what is not a metal worth stealing. As a result of these claims, the insurers increased the excess (the amount the insurers pay) to £5,000 each and every loss. It is in in the insured’s interest to reduce the chance of a loss.

There is one option, that is both cheap and is actually effective. We have all seen the vans driving round with the stickers on the back stating that there are not tools kept in the vehicle over night. A couple of very cheap plastic signs can be added to buildings stating that, there is no metal on the roof. Insurers will not recommend this, but it could be a good way of stopping the thefts in the first place. The exact wording would need to be thought through, depending on each property, but it may be worth considering.

If you want a commercial building insurance quote, that will actually provide cover for theft of metal and the consequent damage, give Businessinsure a call to see what we can do for you. We are an independent business insurance broker, we have access to a number of insurers so can always look around to get you the right quote.

Whilst this has undoubtedly been good for consumers, you do not always benefit in the long term from cutting out the intermediary. In my teens, when you wanted to go on holiday, the only option you really had (unless you absolutely knew what you were doing), was to go to a travel agent. Travel agents earned huge commissions from every step in the chain whether the airlines, coach companies or the hotels. Maybe complacency set in, but it became apparent to many individuals that if they could help you buy one part of the chain direct, you could save money. This is when the adverts started appearing about cutting out the middle-man. Usually, they were correct to work on this basis as you were not getting a great additional service, for the 25-40% extra that it cost to go through an agent. But, agents have learned and adapted and the deals plus the service from a good independent travel agent are without question.

We have seen the same with business insurance. Certain insurers decided that they could offer their products direct to the business community, cutting out the broker. But, many of them have now done an about turn and decided only to work with the business insurance broker market. Why have the done this? Because the insurers cannot be all things to all men.

This morning I have had an enquiry from a company importing electrical stock (marine cover required), storing the stock (warehouse insurance required), installing the stock (public liability insurance required) and advising customers on installations, separately for a fee if required (professional indemnity insurance required). Now, that is not a strange example but there are very few insurers that could happily provide all the cover. As a broker we have to look around to get marine cover from one insurer, storage and liability risks from another and professional indemnity from a third. Why do we do this? To give you, the customer, the best deal. It may be easy to question what a business insurance broker can add to the equation, until you have tried to go direct for all of these individual products you really will never appreciate what a broker will do.

One trigger for this has been the build up to the recession, the recession and it’s aftermath. When cash is tight and also king, more businesses are prone to make claims than to absorb the costs themselves. A second trigger has been the availability of legal expenses insurance. Many business insurance policies now include an element of commercial legal expenses cover as standard. It is therefore easier for businesses to pursue action, in the knowledge that they have cover in place to pay for the legal costs associated with this.

It is therefore important that you have adequate cover in force to protect you against such claims. For most office insurance policies, the legal expenses cover is included as standard. Overall limits of indemnity are usually around the £50,000 to £100,000 mark. In addition to legal expenses cover, you need to make sure that you have adequate liability insurance, both public and products liability. For most offices though, the fees or turnover are earned as a result of services that are offered. A physical product is not always provided. In these cases you need to consider, carefully, whether there is a need or requirement for professional indemnity insurance. Most of the standard package contracts will actually exclude this cover.

There are a few, and we mean few, insurers that will offer all of the covers under one contract. However, in reality it is much more competitive to get one contract for the office and one for professional indemnity. PI cover is for your professional negligence. Public and products liability operate where these is evidence of physical damage or injury. For example the computer that catches light or the person that trips over. Professional indemnity need not have evidence of a physical loss, but a financial loss. You provide advice, for a fee, and someone suffers financially if this is incorrect.

If you are worried about whether this is a requirement for your particular business, then you speak to an independent business insurance broker and get their opinion on whether this is a requirement for your business or not.

These types of policies have been around since the 60’s and 70’s. This is when insurers realised it was not only easier for them (to offer trade specific contracts) but also led the individual tradespeople to think (rightly) they were being covered by a policy designed for them.

Hwoever, as time has moved on not all insurers have moved with the times and internet retail insurance is one of the prime examples. Most of the shop, retail or retailers policies are only available for the traditional high street retail type outlets. Heaven forbid if you actually sell from a website only and do not keep your stock in a shop premises. To us, as business insurance brokers, the risks are broadly the same. there are of course differences. There is less likelihood of a public liability insurance claim when you have no customers stepping foot on your premises. On the other hand, there may be an increased product liability risk if you are an internet retailer. You are more likely to be selling goods around the world than you would be from a shop.

In many cases, you have a combination of the two. You have a traditional shop premises that has decided to supplement their sales with an internet retail business, this sits side by side the traditional shop. When you are looking for cover, many of the underwriters will not cover anything other than a pure shop on a shop policy. If you ask them for a quote to cover all of your business activities, they may put this on a commercial combined insurance contract, which may have higher minimum premiums.

At businessinsure, we are not saying we could save you hundreds and hundreds of pounds, but as an internet business ourselves, we understand that there are different needs and wants than a traditional shop. You may even trade from home and keep your stock at a different address or even in your garage. We can cover these types of business. If you keep your stock at a fulfilment or pick and pack warehouse, we can cover these businesses. If we can’t, we will do all we can to point you in the right direction to find a quote/

The first one is not to touch this type of business. The second one is to underwrite unoccupied business property insurance, but with caution. I can guarantee you that hen’s teeth would appear before you would find an insurer that offers a scheme to underwrite all types of unoccupied properties. Every single risk is to be considered on it’s merits. An unoccupied building in one street could be completely different to a very similar looking one in the next street.

When you want to get a quote, as with every type of business, you need to speak to an independent business insurance broker. They will then look around for you. Going back to the heading of this blog, you are never going to get a quote that is cheap. You can certainly get one that is very, very expensive. This is because the insurers are really saying that they do not want the risk.

To get a quote that is somewhere in he middle, nearer to the cheap, you need to speak to us. Unoccupied residential insurance quotes can be purchased for around 0.20% of the buildings sum insured, this can increase to 0.5 or 0.6% for some of the higher risk empty buildings quotes, such as pubs, hotels and other licensed trades.

Many moons ago I worked for one of the larger, direct only, personal lines insurers. We sold home and motor only in those days. This was before the internet became as readily accessible as it is today and all sales were from a mixture of advertising and solus mailings. All customers purchased an annual policy and, at that time in the late 1990’s we were working on an acquisition cost of £50 per customer. We accepted that whatever was spent on advertising and mailings, we could take a hit of £50 per new customer. Now,with policies for home insurance at the time costing on average £125 per annum, there was no profit margin whatsoever. What we wanted was the customer to stay with us for at least 3 years. If they did not make a claim in that period of time, then the insurers would start to return a profit on that particular customer. We did this in two ways. Firstly, there were no advertising costs to renew the cover each year and secondly, increases were applied at each renewal. Nothing too high though, increases of 3-5% were usually applied, in addition to index-linking. Over two or three years, this meant that a customer was paying, excluding index-linking, about 8% (on the rating applied) to when they were accepted as a new business customer.

What this means, is that as the years go by, the longer you stay with any particular insurer, the more likely you are to be paying more than you would as a new customer. This is where the phrase two tier pricing comes from. Not only do insurers accept that there is a new business acquisition cost, they also have to price competitively to get the business in the door. Now, they would be fools to sell you a new policy for £300 one year and then offer to renew the next at £400. But, what happens if they offer to renew at £317? The chances are that most people will renew it, then the next year is offered at £330.00 etc etc. Over the years, because of your loyalty, you may be penalised.

But, and it really is a huge but, this does not happen in every situation. In particular, if you deal through an independent business insurance broker, they simply cannot get away with adding extra prices on year after year. Customers get wise to this and it goes against the very grain of what we do, which is to service you the customer.

You can, if you wish, chop and change your business insurance arrangements year in, year out. But, this is an awful lot of work for you every twelve months and you may find that eventually you run out of insurers to go to. There are less
commercial insurers than you think out there who can offer decent cover at a decent price. The best thing you can do is to work with a broker and get them to do all of the searching around for you.

If you watch the television or read the papers or the net, you will always fund someone that advocates shopping around. Bargains are there to be had apparently. But, when you are looking at a physical product, such as a branded pair of trainers or a television, you know what you are getting. Whether you buy the product from retailer A, B or C, you will get the same thing. The differences may be in the terms of the warranty provided, but the actual product is identical.

Contrast this with a business insurance policy, and the waters get a little bit murky. What we mean by this, is that unless you purchase an identical policy from the same insurer then you are always going to get differences. We have said this before, long and hard, that this is where you need a broker. A brokers role is to act for you, the customer, and to look for the best deal available, price, cover and service wise. We have one insurer, that we no longer deal with. Their prices were good, their products were good, but their claims service was terrible. If they were not looking to repudiate a claim, they would spend way, way too long sorting the claim out. 

But what is to stop you dealing with this company on a direct basis? Nothign unfortunately. They sell the same products over the net and I fear for any customer that does not have a broker to fight their corner in the event of a loss.

This is not to say that everything out there is doom and gloom though, there are some positives and UK plc continues to prove it is as resilient as ever. Many businesses are continuing to fight through the pain and are showing some signs of high singles and lose double digit percentage growth. But, with the growth, comes the responsibility. If you have been operating as a sole trader, you may find that the only way that you can deal with the growth is to employ someone. Going from working on your own to employing even just one person is a huge, huge step from any business. There are legal responsibilities out there, for which you can find ample advice and help on through some of the UK governments websites.

One of the things you will need to get, is employers liability insurance. It is not a nice to have, but is something that the law of the land states you must have in force or ou could face a fine. The current figure is up to £2,500 per day that you do not have valid cover. In reality, you are given the opportunity to prove this cover in the event of a Health and Safety visit. But, if you want to get the cover in place, before you are forced to do so, then you have an army at your disposal.

That army are the thousands of independent business insurance brokers, ready to provide you with a competitively priced quote and policy. If you need the cover, give us a call.

Before we discuss the differences, a quick note on exactly what loss of rental income is. If you, or a business, owns an asset in the form of a building, you are usually looking to rent this and receive income. The rental income is known as the yield, or earnings. The hope of course is that a combination of increasing value of the property and rental income exceeds the cost of any financing or loan that is taken out to purchase the property. Given that the first has almost been non-existent in the past four years, it is even more important to ensure adequate insurance cover for the latter.

If there is a fire, for example, your tenant will have to move out and more than likely cancel the tenancy agreement they have with you and take out another one. As you are unable to let the property, you are not fulfilling this side of the contract and your tenant is quite entitled to go elsewhere. Therefore, you are left with a property that you are not receiving any rent for. It needn’t just be a fire, it could be a flood, or burst pipe that causes your tenant to move out. This can take any number of months and sometimes years to resolve.

This is where you really need to speak to an independent business insurance broker to ensure that you have adequate protection in the form of rent paid. Certain policies that only offer a 12 month indemnity period, will only pay rent for the maximum period of one year. When you think about a disaster, with a property destroyed the time taken to clear the site, get architects, surveyors and local authorities involved and renewed planning permission and then get the property built – it can take over twelve months. You need to ensure you have cover for this extended period of time.

Public liability is the same. In theory, you can only be held liable if there is some proof of negligence. There are certain cases where you do not even need to be proven to be negligent, but mainly there has to be proof. Whether we all think it is for the good of the country or not, the UK was opened up to make it easier for the person in the street to pursue valid legal action. Certain solicitors have taken this just a bit too far. Again, we read in the news of some action that has been taken which 99 people out of 100 would say is just a joke but they are successful. This is why businesses need to have public liability insurance. There is no legal requirement, usually, to have this cover in force.

However, it is another one of our sensible and prudent covers to have. One of the main benefits of having this cover, is that the spurious claims can also be covered. What this means is that if you have a formal claim made against you, your insurers will deal with this and decline it on your behalf. We see the solicitors letters on a regular basis and if you are happily running your business and then receive a 28 page letter accusing of you x and asking you to prove y and respond by z, it can be very daunting and intimidating. Sometimes deliberately so. This is where you want the reassurance of having a robust policy in place. The other thing you want, and we can offer you, is a good business insurance broker that you can pass everything to and to deal with on your behalf.