Walk down any high street and you will see a glut of mobile phone shops, all the big brands are usually there, plugging their wares.

If you are prepared to sign up to a contract, the longer the better, you will get a mobile phone for free. Everyone know this and we are all aware that the phones are expensive items. Lose one of the phones or get it stolen and you can be shelling out up to £500 for a replacement.

A lot of businesses have corporate accounts for phones, but what about the smaller business? Many owners simply have a phone, in their name, but it is purely for commercial use. Where you are looking at up to £500 to replace, this is an item that needs to be covered, usually under your office insurance.

All policies offer this option, it is not something that is automatically included. So, unless you specify it or ask for it to be included you may find yourself out of pocket in the event of a loss.

Just be aware that some, we feel unfairly, companies have a huge excess of £250 each and every claim. If you look around or speak to a business insurance broker, you can usually get an excess of £100 each and every loss. Yes, £100 is a lot of money, but it is lot less than £500.

Typically, expect to pay around £30 per annum for a £1,000 worth of cover. Just make sure that it provides cover without the need to specify individual items. This way all you phones are covered, as long as the overall sum insured is accurate to replace all of your portable telecoms.

Imagine going to the shops and buying a box of cereal. You pay £2.00 for it and on the way home it falls out of your bag, into a puddle and is ruined.

To put you in the same position that you were in before your loss, you would need to spend a further £2.00. This is the reinstatement cost.

Now, imagine if you bought a laptop in 2008, it had a 50GB hard drive and cost you £750. If you dropped it in the same puddle (careless I know) and went out to buy a new one, you would probably only pay £400. This is the because, to get the same type of computer is cheaper 2 years later.

Now, you have a property that you paid £250,000 for and you are looking for a commercial building insurance quote. Do you insure for the purchase value? the answer is no. You may have got a good deal, it may be an old Grade II listed property or it may be that you have paid a premium for the property because it is in a nice area. So, in this case if your building is destroyed by fire, it may cost £400,000, £200,o00 or any other amount.

The problem is, that you need to find out exactly what it would cost to reinstate the property. The only way to be sure, is to get a valuer to come and see the property and give you an accurate reinstatement figure. There are so many different factors that affect this that a business insurance company cannot give you any sort of help or advice, you need someone to come and see the property.

A quick valuation may only cost you a few hundred pounds and if it shows that you have been insuring for the wrong figure then it may save you money in the long run.

A very (and I mean very) rough rule of thumb, is £100 per square foot for modern industrial (block and steel) premises and £200 per square foot for other properties. This cannot be applied to properties that are listed, of non standard construction or built prior to 1900. Then, you definitely need to get an expert involved.

The simple answer to this, is get someone else to do it. We have had to get used, over the years, to a plethora of price comparison websites.

Now, we think they are a good idea, but you do need to tread carefully when visiting, and using, one that offers to compare business insurance for you. There are reasons why we suggest you tread carefully, and these are as follows:-

I could set up a website tomorrow, that offers this service. But how do you know that I am looking at the whole range of providers. Insurers don’t offer agencies or the ability to sell their products to any Tom, Dick or Harriet. So, my website may only have two companies. I am offering a very restricted comparison but legally, it is ok.

If we extrapolate this a bit and I have ten companies to compare, how do you know that you are getting good cover? You may put in all the details, fill in all the boxes, but at the end of the line, it is the price that comes up in biggest and brightest letters. They are hoping that you will think, phew I have told them everything, this must be the best deal around.

Hold your horses! The website, if you look around at the small print, does not offer to give you the best or even market comparable cover.

So, what is the best, and only way, to go through this process correctly? Speak to a business insurance broker. This is how you get the process done correctly, you talk to an intermediary (who is independent) give them your details and then, you go away and let them do all the running.

If they are any good, within one day at the latest, they will call or email with the best price/terms they can get. True, a broker may only have two companies to compare (legally) but ask them the question. If it is only two, then why?, if you are not happy with the answer, then look elsewhere.

Thankfully, the Great Recession is coming to a very slow and painful end. It will be a long, long haul out of the other side and everyone, except maybe our Prime Minister, will come out of it having learned a lot more.

The Great British pub has been hammered for years, the supermarkets, the smoking ban, brewery rents and the tough economic times have sadly caused many to go. However, there is a resilience and many have decided that in order to survive, they must diversify.

This means for many licensed trade premises that they start to sell food. As the prices charged to the licensee for beers have been increasing, the margins on food have made this an attractive proposition.

But, if you do now sell food on your premises (and didn’t in the past) you need to look at all of the angles. One of these is making sure your pub insurance company is aware of what you do. In addition, you may need to advise your local health and safety department or local authority that you are now cooking and selling food.

As far as your business insurance policy is concerned you need to consider two areas. Firstly that you are covered for all the business activities as some underwriters do charge more money if you are selling food. Secondly, if you are involved in deep fat frying, there may be certain policy conditions that apply. These may be that you have to clean the ducting and equipment in a certain manner at least once a month.

Speak to your broker and just check that they and your insurers are fully aware of what you do.

In more and more UK cities, we are finding that the local authorities are insisting on most licensed trade premises having door staff. Go back to the late 80’s and early 90’s and it was only nightclubs or rough pubs that needed this. Nowadays, the local council sees this as a away of preventing under age drinking and trouble. The nicest establishments may still need to have door staff.

What happens then, when you get a letter from a solicitor alleging that one of the door staff has caused an injury to a customer (which happens more and more). The first thing you need to do is to consult your pub insurance policy. This will, unless you have been mis-sold the cover, include public liability. Any injury to customers would fall under this section of the policy.

You are not obliged to respond to the initial solicitors letter at all, you send it as soon as  possible to your broker and ask them what to do next. This will usually involve a claim form and a visit from a loss adjuster.

What the loss adjuster will check is whether the door staff are direct employees of your business or whether they have been sourced from a third party company. With the licensing laws on security staff, it is more common that a publican will source them from a 3rd party. If this is the case, it may be that the claim is passed directly over to this company. If not, your policy will need to provide the cover. But, be warned you must notify your broker if you employee door staff, whether direct or agency. If you do not and you have a claim, this may invalidate your policy and result in a claim not being paid.

UK commercial insurance companies, when looked at as a whole, have literally thousands of different insurance products. Whatever trade you are involved and however you earn your money (legitimately of course!) you can, if you look around find a policy that will protect your business.

But, it is not the easiest of topics to understand. I am not saying it is too complex for everyone to understand, far from it, what I mean is that if Joe Bloggs is starting out in business and decides to look for a restaurant insurance quote, how does he actually know he is getting what he needs?

You can but a policy from company A, B or C – how can you be sure which is best? You can guarantee that every quote you get will be different in price, but this does not necessarily follow that all the covers will be different.

What you need, to set you on the right road, is professional advice. The good thing about it is, you can get this for nothing. You do not need to pay an expert to come in and assess each of the risks. You should speak to a broker. The emphasis there is speak. Don’t fill in boxes, don’t send off forms – phone someone up and talk to them.

This way, they will review what risks you face, which ones you are legally obliged to cover and which ones you can choose to cover. Then, they will go away and using their knowledge of the market, source you the best price they can for the widest cover. And you only pay once you incept the policy.

Quality is what counts. It doesn’t matter what industry you are involved in, if you are supplying quality, people will appreciate it and will pay a margin for it. Now, we are not saying it is easy charging more than a competitor but this is all part of the sales process.

Financial services is one area where it is incredibly difficult to justify differentials in price, particularly in the current economic climate. Business insurance is one such area where it never was easy to sell and 2009/2010 made it even harder.

But, going back to the first point, if you sell quality you can add a margin. But, for financial protection, if you are quality then  you can bargain for a better price.

Take shop insurance for example, as a nation, excluding the major (10 or more outlets) chains, we have over 150,000 shops. From an underwriting point of view, some of these are good and some are bad. The bad ones are the ones that are at higher risk (ie theft of attractive contents) or they have had and will continue to have, claims.

If you have not had a claim in over three years and all other things from an insurers point of view are good, then you can still get bargains. Of course, the major companies do not have sales, in reality there is a sale all year round. If your business represents the risk quality that they are looking for (see below) then the insurers want your premium and will price their quotes accordingly.

Good points:-

1) Low, or no claims, over the past three years.

2) Trading for more than three years.

3) Family owned.

4) Good security, including roller shutters.

5) Not involved in highly theft attractive stock (ie mobile phones/designer wear) although a restricted number of companies will fight for this business as well.

6) In a nice rural, flood free location. If you are in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh etc, we just need to be more selective in which insurers we apporach.

We like to follow what is happening in the commercial insurance world in different countries.

We have just had news in the UK that the FSA continues to ban brokers for withholding premiums that are due to insurers. This seems to happen more with a business insurance broker that household, and this is where the bigger risks are.

News from Macon.com in the US reaches us of Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Co. deciding to sue a father and son insurance agent for premium they collected from a customer but did not forward to the insurer.

Goodwill Industries, paid over $135,000 in premium that was not passed on. Now in the UK, you would need to bring a civil case to recoup the money, but what amazes me is how the broker actually slept at night.

We are under such strict rules and regulations in the UK that you start to sweat if you think you are going to submit a non-onerous return (of which there are many) one day late. How you can collect premiums that insure businesses, their assets and more importantly their employees, and not worry every second of every day that there is not a policy in force, is beyond me.

Thankfully, when you look around for cover in the UK you can rest assured that any agent or underwriter that you get your cover from is watched very, very closely. The returns we mentioned are only half the story, there are a myriad of rules in place, all designed to help protect you, the consumer.

The BBC are starting to panic (what will a Conservative government do to them?), they are finally looking into many of their contracts and if possible renegotiating or re-tendering.

We have spent years and years lo0oking at how much the beeb have managed to collect from licence fee payers, and their commercial ventures, and wondering whether it was being run as a business. Or, just a bit of a cosy left wing old boys club.

As well as the BBC, the old favourite, The Met Office have had a torrid time of it. They have admitted that they have got their predictions wrong in nine of the last ten years. There are also links with the data they use and the manner in which they predict and the East Anglia University professors who have been discredited through manipulating facts.

To top it all, their super “leader” John Hirst (Salary £20ok plus bonus of £40k) has gone all defensive because everyone can now see through him.

Why are we blogging about this? As an independent business insurance broker, we are involved in controlling a significant amount of commercial building insurance. We arrange cover for properties throughout the UK and we need to plan for our business.

One way of short term planning, for claims personnel, is to look at a range of weather forecasts and predictions. For example, if we are advised of significant (expected) rainfall we tend to alter answer phone messages over weekends in case people call in for help and advice.

We have long given up on the Met Office and their short and long term predictions. It is almost as if you get to the stage now where, if they say it is going to be a very wet season, you go for the opposite.

It is also quite serious, people have lost their lives because of the weather. We can’t blame the councils for not gritting roads when they planned for a mild winter. I am not saying that the Met Office are only to blame.

It has now been reported widely that the BBC, after 90 years, may be moving their weather contract to another company. This is funny really as a cosy monopoly has existed for far too long. Some in the Met Office would not even be aware that the BBC could renegotiate who does their weather.

We won’t bring global warming into it as the Met Office have got egg on their faces there as well. Let’s hope this makes for a more responsible forecast, where the company that provides it knows full well what will happen if they continue to get it wrong.

Go to any fast food takeaway in the UK and, while you are waiting for your meal, have a look at the restaurant. If it is a large branded business the restaurant will look exactly the same as any other outlet throughout the land.

If you go to a small, sole premises outlet you will also notice (in the vast majority of cases) that they share, with the large brands, pride in their outlet. The tables will be clean and the shop front will be spotless.

Don’t believe what you see on these “city grime” programmes on the TV either, most fast food places are exceptionally clean in the preparation area as well.

However, it does not matter how much time you spend on cleaning the cooking area, there will always be some kind of liquid that will be spilled, or on, the floor. In the fast food restaurants, the moisture from the food that is fried and the fat permeates the air. Although most of this is exhausted through the extraction units, some of it will end up on the floors.

Just look at the serving staff behind the counter on a busy day as they slide and skate around. You cannot eliminate this moisture entirely and this means that accidents will occur.

Employers liability insurance protects anyone that works for a business from injury, illness (including mental)  or  disease that they may suffer at work.

Most food preparation businesses suffer from EL claims. The problem is, that a claim is almost guaranteed to be 5, sometimes 6, figures. There are solicitors out there who slaver over getting these types of claims. It is a no-brainer for them. EL is, quite rightly, not subject to many clauses. If an employee is injured (even if they are partially responsible) they have an odds-on chance of winning a settlement.

Slips, trips and falls can cause immense injury to someone. Slipped discs, sore backs and other problems can prevent some people from working for years.

Although we have seen the UK enter, and stay in, the worst recession in living memory, the average cost of EL claims continues to rise. This has a severe affect on the premiums that we get when looking for a commercial insurance quote. Insurers are trying to recoup their losses and are looking to increased premiums to help them on their way. We will have to see the scale of this issue as 2010 progresses, but the hardening (increased premiums) market may not be far away.