Do you work from home? If so, you might have omitted taking out public liability insurance—if, indeed, this type of cover came to your attention at all.
In your position, it’d be understandable not to prioritise purchasing public liability insurance. After all, this cover is not legally required—and, as it is meant to cover costs of compensation claims from members of the public, you might wonder how relevant it really is for home workers.
However, working from home doesn’t necessarily mean that your business activities aren’t posing risks to third parties. Furthermore, if you are scuppered by one of these risks, having to battle a resulting compensation claim could financially blight your business.
In this article, we will look closer at why public liability cover is more important to home workers than you might have realised.
What exactly constitutes “working from home”?
You should be careful not to read too much into the term, as there are various ways of working from home. While you might work solely from home, it’s also possible for someone to spend equal amounts of their working time at their home and where their employers work.
Alternatively, you might work at home only occasionally, or work on the move while designating your home an administrative base.
The popularity of home working has increased over the years. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics as shared by Personnel Today, whereas 11.1% of the UK workforce comprised home workers in 1998, that proportion had grown to 13.9% by early 2014.
In what situations can public liability cover be reassuring?
If you work strictly from home and interact face-to-face with clients only minimally, public liability insurance can seem of scarce relevance, acknowledges Freelance UK. However, if you sometimes leave the house for certain purposes, such as meeting clients at an office you hire just for the occasion, your risk to third parties could be higher.
Do you simply rely on a home office instead, even for client meetings? Whether or not you do, are you meeting clients or customers every day? In that case, public liability insurance is essential, Business Matters insists. You never know when and where you could trigger a compensation claim.
Especially reassuringly, public liability insurance tends to cover “invitees”, “licensees” and even “trespassers”. “Invitees” are customers you invite to your home, “licensees” refers to when you conduct work on other sites, while “trespassers” are people entering your home bar an invitation.
To what extent is public liability cover “necessary”?
You might still be tempted to skip public liability cover, but doing so could undermine your firm’s future. In more and more instances, the cover has been a prerequisite for contracts, particularly public sector ones—and the level of liability cover demanded could reach £10 million pounds.
Industry regulators and membership associations, too, often call for public liability insurance. Fortunately, sourcing cost-effective cover of this type does not have to be arduous, with a broker like Tradesman Saver letting people compare policies quickly.
