As well as providing a service in return for payment from your customers, as a tradesman you also have a responsibility for carrying out that work without injury or damage to your customer. In other words, you have a potential liability for mistakes and errors made during the course of your work. You might be an electrician, for example, yet through a simple mistake complete a re-wiring project that sparks a fire causing damage to your customer’s property. The customer then has a valid claim against you and can sue for damages in compensation for the loss he or she has suffered.

Unless you have tradesman insurance to cover such a claim, of course, any compensation has to be found from your own pocket – and, depending on the size of any claim made, you and your business could be faced with potential ruin.

The error might not even be your immediate or direct mistake. You employ a trainee, for example, and ask him to sweep a chimney. In the course of his work, he dislodges a heavy ceramic cowl on top of the chimney, which comes crashing down through the conservatory of a neighbouring property. Your business is held liable and you are faced with the huge bill of making good the damage. Tradesman insurance is designed to cover you against such claims from third parties through public liability insurance.

That reference to someone in your employ should further prompt another vital consideration of the tradesman insurance package – your liability as an employer for any injury, or even death, of an employee engaged in work on your behalf or an illness which he or she contracts as a result of that work. Indeed, if your business employs any staff – whether they are trainees, apprentices or fully-skilled – you will be typically required by law to hold employers’ liability insurance up to a minimum of £5 million. If you fail to arrange such insurance, you can be fined up to £2,500 a day for every day that it is lacking.

Tradesman insurance is also likely to include insurance to cover the loss, theft or damage to the tools of your trade, including any motor vehicles needed to get you from job to job. A minimum of third party cover is, of course, a legal requirement for any vehicle used and driven in the course of your business.