Insurance for Construction and Building Trades UK: CDM 2015, Boundaries and Claims

Introduction

Fourteen trades are covered here: bricklaying, carpentry, driveway contracting, electrical work, fencing, glazing, plastering, plumbing, general handyman work, painting and decorating, tiling, kitchen fitting, window fitting and carpet fitting. Written about one at a time, they produce fourteen near-identical descriptions of public liability insurance and very little else.

They share one legal framework and differ in a small number of specific, identifiable ways. The shared framework is the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, which almost everyone in these trades assumes does not apply to them. The differences are not generic risk profiles but concrete legal exposures, each tied to a mechanism. This guide sets out the shared framework once, from the legislation, then deals with what is genuinely different trade by trade. Where a statement rests on a legal source, that source has been read at legislation.gov.uk and is identified in the references. Where a statement describes market practice rather than law, it says so.

Key Terms Explained

Client

Any person for whom a project is carried out. A domestic client is one for whom a project is carried out which is not in the course or furtherance of a business of that client — in ordinary language, a homeowner having work done on their own home.

Structure

A very broad regulation 2 term covering any building, timber, masonry, metal or reinforced concrete structure, and separately naming roads, walls, drainage works, earthworks and retaining structures, among many others.

Construction Phase Plan

A plan drawn up under regulation 12 or regulation 15. Where there is only one contractor, regulation 15(5) puts the obligation to draw it up on that contractor.

Adjoining Owner

Under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, the owner of neighbouring land or buildings whose rights are engaged when a building owner works at or near the line of junction, or excavates within the distances set by section 6.

Contractors' All Risks (CAR)

Cover for the works themselves, materials and often hired-in plant while a contract is in progress — distinct from liability cover, which responds to claims by other people.

Three further terms — construction work, contractor and designer — carry more weight than a glossary entry can hold, and are dealt with in the two sections that follow.

What Counts as Construction Work

This is the point on which the largest number of tradespeople are simply mistaken, and it is settled by reading one definition.

Regulation 2 of CDM 2015 defines "construction work" as the carrying out of any building, civil engineering or engineering construction work, and then sets out an inclusive list. The list contains the words "fitting out", "renovation", "repair", "upkeep" and "redecoration or other maintenance". It also expressly captures "cleaning which involves the use of water or an abrasive at high pressure, or the use of corrosive or toxic substances".

Read against the fourteen trades in this guide, that produces some conclusions that surprise people:

• Painting and decorating a room is construction work. "Redecoration" is named in the definition.
• Fitting a kitchen is construction work. "Fitting out" is named in the definition.
• Laying flooring or carpet is fitting out.
• Pressure-washing a driveway is construction work, because of the high-pressure water limb.
• Replacing a cracked pane is repair.

The definition also includes "the preparation for an intended structure, including site clearance, exploration, investigation … and excavation", and "the installation, commissioning, maintenance, repair or removal of mechanical, electrical, gas, compressed air, hydraulic, telecommunications, computer or similar services which are normally fixed within or to a structure". That last limb is what draws a kitchen fitter's plumbing and electrical connections into the same framework.

Contractor, Designer, or Both at Once

CDM allocates duties by role, not by job title, and the same person can hold more than one role on the same job.

You Are Almost Certainly a Contractor

Regulation 2 defines "contractor" as any person who, in the course or furtherance of a business, carries out, manages or controls construction work. There is no size qualification and no employee qualification. A sole-trader tiler working alone on a bathroom is a contractor within the meaning of the Regulations, with the duties set out in regulation 15.

You May Also Be a Designer Without Realising It

"Designer" means any person who, in the course or furtherance of a business, prepares or modifies a design, or arranges for or instructs a person under their control to do so — and the definition expressly notes that a designer can be "a client, contractor or other person referred to in these Regulations". "Design" is itself defined to include drawings, design details, specifications and bills of quantities.

So a kitchen fitter who produces a layout, a carpenter who works out how a structural opening will be formed, and a driveway contractor who specifies a build-up and drainage arrangement are all, on the face of the definition, preparing a design. Duties attaching to designers sit in regulation 9.

What Regulation 7 Actually Transfers

Regulation 7 is titled "Application to domestic clients", and it is short enough that it is worth being precise about, because it is frequently paraphrased into something it does not say.

Regulation 7(1) provides that where the client is a domestic client, the duties in regulations 4(1) to (7) and 6 must be carried out by:

• the contractor, for a project where there is only one contractor;
• the principal contractor, for a project where there is more than one contractor; or
• the principal designer, where there is a written agreement that the principal designer will fulfil those duties.

Regulation 7(2) then deals with the common situation in which a homeowner makes no formal appointments at all. In that case, the designer in control of the pre-construction phase is the principal designer, and the contractor in control of the construction phase is the principal contractor. The roles attach by operation of the Regulations rather than by anyone signing anything. Regulation 7(3) disapplies regulation 5(3) and (4) to domestic clients, so the fall-back that would otherwise leave an ordinary client carrying principal designer and principal contractor duties does not bite on a homeowner.

What This Does Not Mean

It does not mean that a tradesperson "takes on all the homeowner's legal responsibilities". Regulation 7(1) is specific: it names regulations 4(1) to (7) and regulation 6. Those are the client duties concerning suitable arrangements for managing the project, maintaining and reviewing them, providing pre-construction information, ensuring a construction phase plan is drawn up and a health and safety file prepared, taking reasonable steps on principal designer and principal contractor compliance, and passing on the health and safety file on disposal — together with the notification duty in regulation 6.

It also does not mean the homeowner becomes a bystander in every respect. What it means is narrower and more useful to know accurately: on a normal domestic job with one contractor, that contractor carries the specified client duties in addition to their own contractor duties under regulation 15.

The Notification Threshold Almost Nobody Meets

Because regulation 6 is one of the duties transferred by regulation 7, it is worth knowing exactly what it requires — and the answer, for domestic work, is almost always nothing.

Regulation 6(1) provides that a project is notifiable if the construction work on a construction site is scheduled to:

• last longer than 30 working days and have more than 20 workers working simultaneously at any point in the project; or
• exceed 500 person days.

The word "and" in the first limb does a great deal of work. A refurbishment running for three months with four people on site is not notifiable under that limb, because the twenty-worker element is not met. It would only become notifiable if it exceeded 500 person days.

Where a project is notifiable, regulation 6(2) requires notice in writing to the Executive as soon as is practicable before the construction phase begins, containing the particulars in Schedule 1, and regulation 6(3)(b) requires the notice to be clearly displayed in the construction site office where workers can read it.

For the trades covered here, the practical conclusion is that notification is a rare event, and the more important transferred duties are the regulation 4 ones — particularly the construction phase plan.

Your Own Duties Under Regulation 15

Separately from anything transferred by regulation 7, regulation 15 imposes duties on you as a contractor. Several are commonly assumed not to apply to small jobs.

The Construction Phase Plan Applies to Solo Jobs

Regulation 15(5) provides that if there is only one contractor working on the project, that contractor must draw up a construction phase plan, or make arrangements for one to be drawn up, as soon as is practicable prior to setting up a construction site. Regulation 15(6) requires it to fulfil the requirements of regulation 12(2). There is no exemption for short, small or one-person jobs — the proportionality lives in the content of the plan, not in whether one exists.

Competence Is a Duty, Not an Aspiration

Regulation 15(7) prohibits employing or appointing a person to work on a construction site unless they have, or are in the process of obtaining, the necessary skills, knowledge, training and experience for the tasks allocated. For trades that take on labour-only subcontractors at short notice, that duty attaches at the moment of appointment.

Information, Induction and Site Security

Regulation 15(8) requires appropriate supervision, instructions and information for each worker under your control, and 15(9) specifies the content — a site induction where not already provided by the principal contractor, procedures for serious and imminent danger, and information on identified risks. Regulation 15(10) prohibits beginning work unless reasonable steps have been taken to prevent access by unauthorised persons.

Regulation 15(10) has an obvious domestic application. An open front door, an unattended trench in a front garden, or a ladder left standing overnight are site-security questions, and site security is where a third-party injury claim frequently begins.

Excavations Have Their Own Inspection Regime

For the trades that dig, regulation 22 requires all practicable steps to prevent danger from collapse or falling material, and suitable steps to prevent people, equipment or material falling in. Where supports or battering have been provided, regulation 22(4) prohibits work in the excavation unless a competent person has inspected it at the start of the shift, after any event likely to have affected its stability, and after any material unintentionally falls — and is satisfied the work can be carried out safely.

Why Breaching CDM Is Not Itself a Claim

This section corrects a misunderstanding that runs in the opposite direction to the rest of the guide, and getting it right changes what you should expect your insurance to do.

Section 47(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, as substituted by section 69 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 and in force for these purposes from 1 October 2013, provides that breach of a duty imposed by a statutory instrument containing health and safety regulations "shall not be actionable except to the extent that regulations under this section so provide". CDM 2015 runs to 39 regulations and contains no provision restoring civil actionability.

The consequence is that a worker or member of the public injured on your job cannot sue you simply for having breached CDM. They must establish a cause of action that exists independently — most obviously negligence, and section 47(4) expressly preserves "any right of action which exists apart from the provisions of this Act".

What CDM Breach Still Does

It remains enforceable by the Health and Safety Executive through criminal proceedings, and that route is unaffected by section 47. It also remains highly relevant evidentially: a documented failure to work through duties the law placed on you is material to whether you took reasonable care, even though it is not the cause of action itself.

The Insurance Consequence

Liability policies respond to civil legal liability to other people. They are not designed to pay criminal fines, and an HSE prosecution is a criminal matter. So the honest picture is a split one: your public liability cover is aimed at the negligence claim, and the regulatory exposure sits largely outside it. Some policies offer legal expenses or prosecution defence costs cover as a separate feature — that is a distinct product feature to look for rather than something to assume is present.

Compulsory, Contractual and Optional Cover

The Employers' Liability Duty

Section 1 of the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 requires every employer carrying on business in Great Britain to insure against liability for bodily injury or disease sustained by employees arising out of and in the course of their employment. Northern Ireland has separate legislation. Whether a labour-only subcontractor is genuinely self-employed or is in substance your employee turns on the working relationship rather than the label — a live question in these trades, and one worth resolving before an incident rather than after. Our Employers' Liability Insurance UK guide covers the duty in detail, and checking FCA authorisation confirms an insurer is genuinely authorised before you buy.

The Sole Trader Gap

A sole trader with no employees has no employers' liability duty — and, for the same reason, no employers' liability policy responds if they are injured themselves, because they are not anyone's employee. Public liability protects other people from you; it does not protect you. For a self-employed bricklayer or fencing contractor whose income depends on being physically able to work, that is a significant gap, and personal accident cover is the product aimed at it.

Boundary Law: The Party Wall etc. Act 1996

Several of these trades work at or near a boundary as a matter of routine, and a separate statute applies there. It is a civil code with its own notice procedure, and it operates independently of CDM.

Section 2: Work to a Party Structure

Section 2 applies where lands of different owners adjoin and at the line of junction the lands are built on, or a boundary wall has been erected. It gives a building owner a list of rights, including the right to underpin, thicken or raise a party structure, to cut into a party structure for any purpose, and to cut away footings or projections.

The part that matters for insurance is what those rights are subject to. Section 2(5) makes the rights at 2(2)(f), (g) and (h) exercisable "subject to making good all damage occasioned by the work to the adjoining premises or to their internal furnishings and decorations", and similar making-good obligations appear at 2(3)(a), 2(4)(a) and 2(6). This is a statutory obligation attaching to the exercise of the right. It is not framed as a negligence liability, and it extends expressly to internal furnishings and decorations, not just to the structure.

Section 6: The Three-Metre and Six-Metre Rules

Section 6 is the provision most relevant to the trades that dig, and it is widely unknown. It applies where a building owner proposes to excavate, or excavate for and erect a building or structure:

• Within three metres measured horizontally from any part of a neighbouring building or structure, where any part of the proposed excavation will within those three metres go to a lower level than the bottom of the neighbour's foundations; or
• Within six metres, where the excavation will within those six metres meet a plane drawn downwards at forty-five degrees to the horizontal from the bottom of the neighbour's foundations.

Where the section applies, section 6(5) requires the building owner to serve notice on the adjoining owner at least one month before beginning to excavate, accompanied under 6(6) by plans and sections showing the site and depth of the excavation. Section 6(7) then provides that if the adjoining owner does not serve a notice of consent within fourteen days, they are deemed to have dissented and a dispute is deemed to have arisen. Silence is not agreement.

Section 6(3) may require the building owner, at their own expense, to underpin or otherwise strengthen or safeguard the neighbour's foundations. Section 6(10) makes clear that nothing in the section relieves the building owner from any liability they would otherwise have for injury to an adjoining owner or occupier.

Working On or Across the Public Highway

A driveway that meets a road crosses land the client does not own, and a separate statutory regime governs that strip.

Section 184 of the Highways Act 1980 deals with vehicle crossings over footways and verges. The powers it confers sit with the highway authority. Section 184(11) provides that any person may request the highway authority to execute works constructing a vehicle crossing over a footway or verge, and the authority may approve the request with or without modification, propose alternative works, or reject it. Section 184(12) provides for a quotation, and section 184(13) for the authority to execute the works once payment is deposited. Where land is being developed under a planning permission, section 184(9) allows the authority to authorise the developer to execute the works in accordance with plans the authority has approved.

Section 184(16) is worth noting for a different reason: nothing in the section imposes on any person other than a highway authority an obligation to maintain a vehicle crossing. And section 184(17) creates an offence, punishable by a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale, where a person knowingly uses a footway or verge as a crossing in contravention of conditions imposed by the authority, or knowingly permits it to be so used.

The practical point for a driveway contractor is that the crossing over the public footway is not simply part of your quote. It is the highway authority's work, or work you may be authorised to carry out to their approved plans. Damage to the highway or to apparatus beneath it is a different order of exposure from damage inside a client's boundary.

Building Control and Self-Certification

Schedule 3 to the Building Regulations 2010 is the self-certification schedule. It is referenced by regulation 12(6)(a), which removes the duty to notify building control, and by regulation 20(1), which sets out what the registered person must then do instead. Schedule 3 is a two-column table: column 1 describes a type of work, and column 2 describes the person who may carry that work out under a scheme. Several entries bear directly on the trades in this guide.

What registration under one of these schemes does is precise. It allows the registered person to self-certify, which is why the schedule is framed as an exemption from the requirement to notify building control at all. It is a building-control mechanism, and nothing more.

Regulation 20 then attaches a duty that is easy to overlook and that has direct evidential value in a dispute. Where the self-certification route is used, regulation 20(3) requires the person carrying out the work, not more than thirty days after completion, to give the occupier a copy of the compliance certificate and to give the building control authority either that certificate or notice to that effect. Regulation 20(3A) requires the authority to store what it receives in retrievable form. That is why, years later, a certificate lodged under regulation 20 can often still be recovered when the tradesperson's own paperwork has gone.

Part P: Electrical Safety, and When Electrical Work Must Be Notified

Electrical work in and around homes sits inside its own corner of the Building Regulations, and it is the corner where the four nations of the UK diverge most sharply. Getting the geography right matters, because a great deal of published trade advice states the English position as though it were the law everywhere.

What Part P Actually Requires

Part P of Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations 2010 contains a single functional requirement, P1:

"Reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installations from fire or injury."

That is the whole requirement. It does not name a wiring standard, it does not name a registration body, and it does not mention insurance. What it does is impose a functional design-and-installation duty, which is the form most of Schedule 1 takes.

The Scope Limit Most Summaries Omit

Column 2 of Part P limits the requirement in a way that is frequently dropped from trade summaries. The requirements of Part P apply only to electrical installations that are intended to operate at low or extra-low voltage and that fall within one of four descriptions:

• in or attached to a dwelling;
• in the common parts of a building serving one or more dwellings, but excluding power supplies to lifts;
• in a building that receives its electricity from a source located within or shared with a dwelling; or
• in a garden, or in or on land associated with a building, where the electricity is from a source located within or shared with a dwelling.

The practical consequence is that Part P is a domestic electrical safety provision. A rewire of a standalone office block, a factory distribution board, or a retail unit with its own independent supply is outside Part P altogether. That does not make the work unregulated — other parts of Schedule 1, the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and the general duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 continue to apply — but it does mean the notification analysis below is irrelevant to it.

England: The Three Notifiable Categories

The default position in regulation 12 is that a person intending to carry out building work must give a building notice or an application for building control approval with full plans. For electrical work in England, regulation 12(6A) narrows this dramatically. It provides that a person carrying out building work to which Part P applies is required to notify where the work consists of:

• the installation of a new circuit;
• the replacement of a consumer unit; or
• any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location.

Everything else within Part P scope falls outside the notification duty in England. Adding a socket to an existing circuit in a bedroom, replacing a light fitting, or replacing a damaged length of cable on an existing circuit is Part P work — the P1 standard applies to it — but it is not notifiable.

What "Special Location" Means

Regulation 12(9) defines the term, and the definition is dimensional rather than descriptive. In a room containing a bath or shower, a special location is the space surrounding a bath tap or shower head, extending vertically from the finished floor level to a height of 2.25 metres, or to the position of the shower head where it is attached higher than that; and extending horizontally 0.6 metres from the edge of the bath tub or shower tray.

This is why bathroom work is the recurring flashpoint. A tiler, bathroom fitter or kitchen fitter who moves a shaver socket or adds a downlight within that envelope has performed notifiable work on an existing circuit, whereas the same alteration two metres away has not.

Wales: A Materially Different Position

Regulation 12(6A) was inserted for England only, with effect from 6 April 2013. The editorial note on the amending provision records that it has not applied in relation to Wales at all since 8 June 2018, and the Wales version of regulation 12 on legislation.gov.uk shows paragraph (6A) as omitted.

Part P itself is unchanged — the P1 requirement and its scope limitation read identically in the England and Wales versions of Schedule 1. What differs is the machinery of notification, and the difference runs in two directions at once.

England took the positive route. Regulation 12(6A) states what is notifiable, and in the same 2013 amendment paragraphs 1(a) to (e) of Schedule 4 — which had listed non-notifiable electrical work — were omitted for England, because the new positive list made them redundant.

Wales kept the negative route. Schedule 4 also carries two extent versions, and the Wales version retains paragraphs 1(a) to (e), reinserted with effect from 8 June 2018. They describe work consisting of:

• replacing any fixed electrical equipment which does not include the provision of any new fixed cabling or a consumer unit;
• replacing a damaged cable for a single circuit only;
• re-fixing or replacing enclosures of existing installation components, where the circuit protective measures are unaffected;
• providing mechanical protection to an existing fixed installation, where the circuit protective measures and the current carrying capacity of conductors are unaffected by the increased thermal insulation; and
• installing or upgrading main or supplementary equipotential bonding.

So the two nations reach a similar practical destination by opposite drafting techniques. In England you ask whether the work is one of the three notifiable things. In Wales you ask whether the work is one of the five non-notifiable things, or otherwise falls within Schedule 3 carried out by a registered person; if it is neither, the general duty in regulation 12(2) applies. The lists are not mirror images of each other, so the answer can differ on the same job — most obviously for work in a special location, which is expressly notifiable in England and has no equivalent trigger in the Welsh list.

Scotland: A Separate System Entirely

The Building Regulations 2010 are headed "BUILDING AND BUILDINGS, ENGLAND AND WALES". Part P does not apply in Scotland. Scotland operates a distinct building standards system under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, made by the Scottish Ministers. Under section 8 of the 2003 Act, a building warrant granted under section 9 is required for work of the descriptions there specified, including the provision of services, fittings or equipment in or in connection with a building.

So the Scottish control mechanism is a warrant obtained in advance, rather than an England-style notification carve-out layered on top of a competent person scheme. Anyone describing "Part P registration" as a Scottish requirement has transplanted the wrong regime. Northern Ireland likewise operates its own building regulations, which are outside the scope of this guide.

Why Any of This Reaches Your Insurance

The connection is evidential rather than contractual. A public liability or professional indemnity insurer does not, as a rule, decline a claim because a building notice was not given. What happens instead is that the notification and certification record becomes the spine of the factual dispute. Where a consumer unit was replaced and a certificate was lodged under regulation 20(3), there is a dated third-party record of the installation's condition at handover. Where nothing was lodged, the claimant's expert has an unopposed narrative and you are arguing from memory.

There is a second, blunter route. Most trade liability policies contain a condition requiring the insured to comply with statutory requirements, or to hold and maintain any registration or approval the law requires for the work undertaken. Where such a condition exists, the question is not whether the Building Regulations create an insurance duty — they do not — but whether the policy has separately made compliance a condition of cover. That is a question about the wording in front of you, and it deserves reading before a claim rather than after one.

Gas Work and the Regulation 3 Competence Rule

Gas is the one area in this guide where the controlling rule is not a building regulation at all. It sits in health and safety law, it applies more widely geographically than Part P, and it is drafted as a prohibition rather than as a standard.

The Prohibition at Regulation 3

Regulation 3(1) of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 provides:

"No person shall carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting or gas storage vessel unless he is competent to do so."

That opening duty binds everybody, registered or not. Regulation 3(3) then adds the registration requirement that most people mean when they talk about gas registration. It provides that no employer shall allow an employee to carry out work in relation to a gas fitting or service pipework, and no self-employed person shall carry out such work, unless the employer or self-employed person is a member of a class of persons approved for the time being by the Health and Safety Executive for the purposes of that paragraph.

Note the mechanism carefully. The regulation does not name a company or a scheme. It creates an approval power exercised by the HSE, and membership of the approved class is what the law requires. This is also the hook that Schedule 3 to the Building Regulations uses: items 1 and 4 of that table permit self-certification by a person in a class approved under regulation 3.

The Two Carve-Outs

Regulation 3(4) removes two narrow categories from the paragraph (3) requirement:

• the replacement of a hose or regulator on a portable or mobile space heater; and
• the replacement of a hose connecting a re-fillable cylinder to installation pipework.

Those are the exceptions. They are far narrower than the informal notion that "small gas jobs" sit outside the regime, and the general competence duty at regulation 3(1) continues to apply to them regardless.

Where the Rule Applies

The 1998 Regulations were made under sections 15 and 82(3)(a) of, and Schedule 3 to, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Section 84(1) of that Act provides that the Act, subject to narrow exceptions, does not extend to Northern Ireland. The practical effect is that the regulation 3 competence and approval rules operate across Great Britain — England, Wales and Scotland alike — rather than stopping at the England and Wales boundary the way Part P does. A plumber who crosses into Scotland leaves Part P behind but does not leave regulation 3 behind.

The Insurance Consequence, Stated Precisely

Where an insured carries out gas work in breach of regulation 3(3), two distinct things can follow, and they are often conflated.

The first is the policy's own trade description. Liability cover responds to the business described in the schedule. If the declared business does not include gas work, a gas-related claim may fall outside the cover simply because the activity was never underwritten — that is a scope question, not a penalty for the breach.

The second is any express condition requiring compliance with statutory requirements or the holding of a required registration. Where that condition is present and unmet, the insurer may have a contractual remedy. Whether it does, and what that remedy is, depends on the wording and on the Insurance Act 2015 framework governing terms of that kind. What is not accurate is the widespread claim that unregistered gas work automatically voids a policy. Voidance is a specific remedy with specific preconditions, and a breach of a regulation is not, by itself, one of them.

The Fourteen Trades: Where They Genuinely Differ

Everything above applies to all fourteen. What follows is what does not — the specific exposure that makes each trade's claims history look different from its neighbour's. These are not risk profiles in the abstract; each one is tied to a mechanism.

Jump to your trade: Bricklayer · Carpenter · Driveway contractor · Electrician · Fencing contractor · Glazier · Plasterer · Plumber · Handyman · Painter and decorator · Tiler · Kitchen fitter · Window fitter · Carpet fitter

Bricklayer

The bricklayer works at the line of junction more often than anyone else in this list. Garden walls, raised party fence walls and cutting into a party structure to insert a damp proof course — expressly named at section 2(2)(f) — all sit inside the party wall regime, with its make-good obligation reaching the neighbour's internal furnishings and decorations.

Masonry work also produces a characteristic long-tail problem. Movement, cracking and damp penetration through new brickwork or a rebuilt wall may not become apparent for a year or more, and the person complaining may be the client's neighbour or the client's buyer rather than the client. That raises a question worth asking your broker directly: whether the liability cover is written on a claims-made or a claims-occurring basis, because it determines whether a policy in force today responds to work you did three years ago.

Carpenter

Carpentry splits across the CDM role boundary more sharply than most trades. First-fix work — joists, studwork, roof timbers, forming openings — is unambiguously construction work on the structure. Second-fix and bespoke work, by contrast, frequently involves the carpenter deciding how something will be built, which engages the regulation 2 definition of "designer" because a specification is design.

That split maps onto two different insurance products. Damage caused while working is public liability territory. A staircase that fails to meet its intended purpose because of how it was specified is closer to professional indemnity territory. Carpenters who move between installing to someone else's drawings and designing their own solutions are moving between two cover types without necessarily realising it. Our Professional Indemnity Insurance UK guide sets out where that line falls.

There is also a workshop dimension unique among these trades. Where a carpenter maintains premises with fixed machinery and holds client materials off site, the standard "tools in a van" framing of trade cover is a poor fit, and premises, stock and machinery need to be considered separately.

Driveway Contractor

No other trade here engages three statutory regimes on a single job: regulation 22 for the excavation, section 6 of the Party Wall Act where the dig runs close to a neighbour's foundations, and section 184 for the crossing over the footway. All three are set out above; what is distinctive is that a single ordinary driveway replacement can touch all of them.

Buried services are the defining physical risk. Water, gas, electricity and telecoms apparatus beneath a residential frontage is frequently unmarked and rarely where anyone expects it, and striking it produces third-party damage of a kind quite different from scuffing a wall — the affected party may be a utility undertaker rather than the client.

Worth noting as well: regulation 2's "cleaning which involves the use of water … at high pressure" limb means that jet-washing an existing drive is itself construction work under CDM, which surprises contractors who treat cleaning as an unregulated add-on service.

Electrician

The electrician is the only trade in this guide whose ordinary domestic work sits inside a named part of Schedule 1, and the notification analysis set out at Part P above is the working detail of the job rather than background. Two practical consequences follow for cover.

The first is the shape of the loss. Electrical failure is one of the few mechanisms in this list capable of producing a total loss of the building, and the claim that follows is a fire claim rather than a damaged-surface claim. That is why the indemnity limit question, which for most of these trades is a commercial judgement about the largest single job, is for an electrician a judgement about the largest single building worked in. A modest rewire in a terrace carries a plausible worst case in the millions because the adjoining properties are attached.

The second is the long tail. An installation defect can lie inert for years before the conditions that expose it occur. Liability policies for these trades are usually written on an occurrence basis for public liability but on a claims-made basis for professional indemnity, and the interaction matters more here than for a trade whose damage manifests within days. An electrician who ceases trading without arranging run-off leaves a professional indemnity gap that stretches over precisely the period when installation defects tend to surface.

On design work, the boundary is worth stating plainly. Selecting and specifying a distribution arrangement, calculating loading, or advising a client that an existing installation is adequate for a planned extension are all design activities. As set out at Contractor, Designer, or Both at Once, that engages the designer duties in CDM 2015 and can engage professional indemnity rather than public liability if the loss is purely financial. An electrician who only installs to another party's specification is in a materially different position from one who designs what they install.

Fencing Contractor

Fencing looks like the simplest trade here and carries one of the most awkward exposures, because a fence is a statement about where a boundary is.

Two distinct things can go wrong, and only one of them is an insurance question. If a post-hole auger cuts a buried cable, that is third-party property damage. If the fence is erected in the wrong place, the dispute is about title to land, and a public liability policy responding to accidental injury and property damage is not designed for it. Rectification of your own misplaced work is generally the sort of thing liability wordings exclude in any event. This is why a fencing contractor's most valuable protective habit is documentary — an agreed, dated record of the line the client instructed, before any post goes in.

Section 6 also applies to fencing more often than fencers expect: a post hole is an excavation, and the three-metre test does not care how small it is.

Glazier

The glazier's problem is that their stock is simultaneously valuable, fragile and mobile, and it spends part of its life being carried by hand near other people's property.

Three separate exposures need distinguishing, because they are often assumed to be one. Breakage of the glass itself in transit or handling is a loss of your own stock. Damage the glass does to the client's property when it fails is third-party property damage. And a defect in the glass unit supplied — a failed seal, a delamination — is a product question rather than an installation one. Standard business contents wordings are frequently written around a specified premises, which fits a trade whose stock is almost never at a premises rather poorly.

Where glazing involves access above ground level, the Work at Height Regulations 2005 apply on their own terms — see our working-at-height trades guide.

Plasterer

Plastering introduces large volumes of water into a building, and the characteristic claim follows from that rather than from anything dramatic.

No trade sits closer to the defective-work exclusion described below. On a plastering job the line falls between re-skimming a wall that has blown — your own work — and the ruined flooring, decoration or furniture beneath it, which is not. Two losses, one cause, opposite sides of a single exclusion. That is the ordinary shape of a plastering claim rather than an unusual one, and knowing which side a loss falls on is the most useful thing a plasterer can understand about their policy.

External rendering sits in a different place again: it is usually work at height, it is weather-dependent, and a partly rendered elevation left exposed before a storm creates an ingress exposure that has more in common with a contractors' all risks question than a liability one.

Plumber

Plumbing produces the highest-frequency property damage claim of any trade in this guide, and it produces it through a mechanism that is unusually unforgiving: escaping water travels, it travels downwards through a building the plumber has no contract with, and it keeps causing loss after the tradesperson has left site.

That has a specific consequence for the defective-work exclusion discussed below. The joint that failed is your workmanship. The floor, ceiling, plaster and contents of the flat below are not. In a flat conversion the affected party is frequently a stranger to the contract altogether, which removes any prospect of resolving the matter commercially with a client and turns it into a liability claim from the outset.

The second distinctive exposure is temporal. A plumber who isolates a supply, opens a system and leaves it part-completed overnight has created a condition that can cause loss in the hours when nobody is present. Insurers are attentive to this, and some policies attach conditions about leaving systems under pressure unattended or about the use of heat. Reading those conditions is more productive for a plumber than reading the headline limit.

Where the work extends into gas, the analysis changes character entirely and is set out at Gas Work and the Regulation 3 Competence Rule above. The single most common coverage failure is not a dramatic breach of regulation 3 but a mismatch between a trade description that says "plumbing" and an invoice book that includes boiler installations and services. Bathroom work also brings the special location definition into play, because an alteration to an existing circuit within 0.6 metres of a bath or shower tray, up to 2.25 metres from floor level, is notifiable electrical work in England even when carried out by a plumber in the course of a plumbing job.

Handyman

The handyman's exposure is not a physical risk at all. It is a definitional one.

Every other trade in this list has a reasonably stable description of what it does. "Handyman" does not, and a liability policy is written around a declared trade description. The mismatch between "I do a bit of everything" and a fixed description on a schedule is where handyman claims are refused — not because the work was done badly, but because the particular activity was never within the description the insurer accepted.

Gas and fixed electrical work deserve specific attention, because they sit inside separate registered regimes — Schedule 3 items 1 and 4 for gas, items 8 and 9 for domestic electrical work — rather than being merely riskier. A handyman policy is unlikely to contemplate either. Both regimes, and the trades that operate inside them, are covered above at Part P and electrical notification and gas work and the regulation 3 competence rule, and again below under Electrician and Plumber.

Painter and Decorator

Regulation 2 names "redecoration" in the definition of construction work, which settles any argument about whether CDM applies to a decorating job. It does.

The characteristic claim in this trade is small in cause and large in consequence. Overspray drifting onto a car, a solvent mark on a stone floor, a knocked tin on a carpeted stair, a ladder foot on a polished surface — none of these involve structural failure, and all of them involve damage to property the client cares about and can price precisely. Decorating also puts the tradesperson inside occupied homes for longer continuous periods than almost any other trade here, which increases exposure to the client's contents rather than to the building.

Access equipment is the other half of the picture: ladders, stepladders, trestles and towers bring the Work at Height Regulations 2005 into play, and "ladder" there expressly includes stepladders.

Tiler

Tiling failures are slow, hidden and expensive, which is an unusual combination.

The substrate and the waterproofing beneath the tile decide whether the job succeeds, and neither is visible once the work is finished. A tanking failure in a wet room does not announce itself; it appears months later as damage to the structure below, often in a different room and sometimes in a different flat. By the time the cause is identified, the tiler may have completed dozens of other jobs.

That delay makes two policy features unusually important for this trade. The first is the claims-made versus claims-occurring question, because a long gap between work and discovery is the normal case rather than the exception. The second is again the defective-work boundary: replacing the tiling is your own work; the joists, ceiling and contents beneath it are not.

Kitchen Fitter

Kitchen fitting is the trade in this list most likely to occupy several CDM roles at once and to sit at the boundary of several registered regimes.

Producing the layout makes the fitter a designer; making the final plumbing connections falls inside regulation 2's services limb; and Schedule 3 bites twice, at item 14 for sinks, baths, showers and bathrooms, and item 12 for electrical work done as a necessary adjunct to other work by a registered person. Few trades sit across so many regimes at once.

Commercially, the exposure is concentrated. A kitchen is a single, high-value, largely irreplaceable-in-parts installation, frequently with appliances supplied by the client. Damage to a client-supplied appliance during fitting raises a question of who bore the risk at that moment, and interface liability — where the fitter subcontracts the plumbing or electrical connections — needs to be settled in writing rather than discovered at claim stage.

Window Fitter

Window fitting is the only trade here with a named self-certification scheme of its own in Schedule 3 to the Building Regulations 2010.

On the latest revised version of the schedule, item 10 covers the installation, as a replacement, of a window, rooflight, roof window or door in an existing dwelling, and column 2 names Assure Certification Limited, Blue Flame Certification Limited, CERTASS Limited, Certsure LLP, Fensa Limited under the Fenestration Self-Assessment Scheme, and NAPIT Registration Limited. Item 11 covers the same work in an existing building other than a dwelling, excluding load-bearing or structural glass, glazed curtain walling and revolving doors. The exposure that follows is not a safety one: uncertified work surfaces at conveyancing, sometimes years later, when a buyer's solicitor asks for a certificate that does not exist. That problem is contractual and financial, which means a public liability policy is not the instrument that answers it.

Physically, the trade combines glass handling with removing part of the building envelope, often leaving an opening in an occupied house. Weather ingress during the work is a distinct exposure from damage caused by the work.

Carpet Fitter

Carpet fitting is "fitting out" within regulation 2, and it carries an evidential problem that is close to unique in this list.

Lifting an old floor covering reveals what is underneath. Rot, damp, damaged boards, cracked screed and previous poor work all become visible for the first time at the moment the fitter arrives — which is also the moment the client first sees them. The question of whether the fitter caused the damage or merely uncovered it is genuinely difficult to answer after the fact, and it is answered almost entirely by photographs taken before work starts.

Two further features distinguish the trade: materials frequently travel at the fitter's risk between supplier and site, which is a goods in transit question rather than a tools one; and where the fitter supplies as well as fits, a defect in the covering itself is a product matter separate from the fitting work.

Exclusions That Cause Declined Claims

Wordings vary substantially between insurers and are not standardised. Treat these as things to confirm in your own policy rather than a description of what any particular policy says.

Rectifying Your Own Defective Work

The most consequential exclusion for all fourteen trades. Liability policies commonly exclude the cost of putting right your own workmanship while responding to damage that workmanship causes to other property. Where the two are physically intertwined — a failed tanking membrane and the ceiling below it — the apportionment is where the argument happens.

Activities Outside the Declared Trade Description

Acute for handymen and multi-trade businesses, but it catches specialists too. A tiler who starts taking on wet-room construction, or a decorator who adds pressure-washing, has changed what they do without necessarily telling anyone.

Damage to Property in Your Care, Custody or Control

Frequently excluded or separately conditioned. It matters most for the trades that take possession of client property — a carpenter storing materials in a workshop, a kitchen fitter handling client-supplied appliances, a carpet fitter moving furniture.

Contractual Liability Assumed Beyond Common Law

Where a contract makes you responsible for more than the general law would, insurers commonly restrict cover for the additional element. Signing a principal contractor's standard terms without reading the indemnity clause is the usual route in.

Tools Left in a Vehicle Overnight

Commonly a heavily conditioned extension rather than an outright exclusion — often requiring the vehicle to be locked, alarmed, and sometimes garaged or in a secure compound. These trades habitually load out the night before, so the condition is worth reading rather than assuming.

Faulty Materials You Supplied, and Gradual Causes

A defect in a product you supplied is handled differently from a defect in your workmanship — relevant to glaziers, carpet fitters, kitchen fitters and window fitters who supply as well as install. Separately, damage that develops slowly, such as damp or movement, is treated differently from sudden accidental damage in many wordings, and tiling, plastering and bricklaying claims are disproportionately of that type.

Evidence That Decides a Building Claim

Building claims turn on the state of the property before you arrived, and on what you were actually asked to do. Both are matters of record or they are matters of recollection.

Pre-Work Photographs

The single most valuable habit across all fourteen trades, and the one most consistently skipped. Photographs of existing damage, subfloor condition, boundary features, adjacent surfaces and the client's contents, taken and dated before any work begins, resolve the caused-or-uncovered question that otherwise cannot be resolved at all.

The Written Scope, and the Records the Regulations Already Require

A quotation describing the work in the same terms as your policy's trade description does two jobs: it settles what the client agreed to, and it demonstrates the work was within the risk your insurer accepted. Alongside it, two documents CDM already obliges you to produce carry evidential weight beyond compliance — the construction phase plan under regulation 15(5), and, for the digging trades, the inspection records arising from regulation 22(4) and reported under regulation 24. Both are contemporaneous evidence that hazards were identified before work started, which bears directly on the negligence question any civil claim will actually turn on.

Boundary and Instruction Records

For fencing and boundary work, a dated plan or photograph showing the line the client instructed, ideally acknowledged by them. Where party wall notices have been served, copies of the notices and of any consent or award belong in the job file.

Handover, Sign-Off and Certification

The point at which responsibility passes. For trades whose work is later disturbed by others — a plasterer whose finish is damaged by a following electrician, a tiler whose work is drilled into — a signed handover with photographs marks the boundary of what you answer for. Where a Schedule 3 scheme applies, keep your own copy of the certificate rather than only issuing it to the client; it is the document a conveyancer will ask for years later.

A Decision Framework Before You Quote

Each item below is a check, not a summary — it points at a decision that has to be made before the job is priced.

1. Is the work within your declared trade description?

Not within your competence. Within the description your insurer accepted — a different question, and not one your own judgement answers.

2. Are you the only contractor?

It decides whether regulation 15(5) puts the construction phase plan on you, or whether regulation 5 appointments and principal contractor duties are in play.

3. Are you also designing?

A layout, a specification or a method is a design under regulation 2 — and may move you into professional indemnity territory.

4. Will any excavation trigger section 6?

Within three metres and deeper than the neighbour's foundations, or within six metres and inside the forty-five degree plane. Notice is needed a month ahead, so this is a pricing question, not a site question.

5. Does anything sit on the public highway?

A crossing over a kerbed footway belongs to the highway authority under section 184. Establish who is doing it, and on whose authority, before you price it.

6. Does a Schedule 3 scheme apply, and are you registered?

If the work is on the list and you are not registered, the building-control route needs settling before you start.

7. Who is an employee?

Labour-only subcontractors may be employees in substance regardless of the label, which determines whether the compulsory 1969 Act duty is engaged.

8. Is the liability cover claims-made or claims-occurring?

For bricklaying, tiling and plastering, where failure surfaces long after completion, this is not a technicality.

Claim Scenarios

Explanatory scenarios illustrating the distinctions set out above. They are not reports of specific cases.

References and Editorial Standards

Primary sources read directly at legislation.gov.uk

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (SI 2015/51):

• Regulation 2 (Interpretation) — "construction work" including fitting out, renovation, repair, upkeep, redecoration and the high-pressure cleaning limb; "client"; "domestic client"; "contractor"; "designer" and "design"; "structure"; "excavation".
• Regulation 4 — the client duties at 4(1) to (7) that regulation 7 transfers.
• Regulation 5 — written appointment where there is more than one contractor; the 5(3) and 5(4) fall-backs.
• Regulation 6 — notification thresholds at 6(1)(a) and (b); written notice at 6(2); site display at 6(3)(b).
• Regulation 7 — transfer of the duties in regulations 4(1) to (7) and 6; the categories at 7(1)(a) to (c); default attachment of roles at 7(2); disapplication at 7(3).
• Regulation 15 — client awareness at 15(1); construction phase plan at 15(5) and 15(6); competence at 15(7); information and induction at 15(8) and 15(9); site security at 15(10).
• Regulation 22 — prevention of collapse and falls into excavations; inspection requirements at 22(4) including inspection at the start of the shift.
• Arrangement of regulations — confirming the Regulations comprise 39 regulations and contain no provision conferring civil actionability.

Other legislation:

• Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, s.47 — s.47(2) as substituted by s.69 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, in force for these purposes from 1 October 2013; preservation of independent rights of action at s.47(4).
• Party Wall etc. Act 1996, s.2 — the building owner's rights including cutting into a party structure at 2(2)(f); making-good obligations at 2(3)(a), 2(4)(a), 2(5) and 2(6), extending to internal furnishings and decorations.
• Party Wall etc. Act 1996, s.6 — the three-metre test at 6(1); the six-metre and forty-five degree test at 6(2); underpinning at 6(3); one month's notice at 6(5); plans at 6(6); fourteen-day deemed dissent at 6(7); preservation of other liability at 6(10).
• Highways Act 1980, s.184 — the highway authority's powers over vehicle crossings; request procedure at 184(11) to (13); authorisation of a developer at 184(9); maintenance at 184(16); the offence at 184(17).
• The Building Regulations 2010 (SI 2010/2214), Schedule 3 — self-certification schemes referenced by regulations 12(6)(a) and 20(1). The substituted table was read on the latest revised version: items 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 16 and the persons named in column 2.
• The Building Regulations 2010, Schedule 1, Part P — requirement P1 (design and installation of electrical installations), and the column 2 limitation of Part P to installations at low or extra-low voltage falling within the four descriptions at (a) to (d).
• The Building Regulations 2010, regulation 12 — the general duty at 12(2); the exemptions at 12(6)(a) and (b); the England-only notification provision at 12(6A)(a) to (c); the definition of "special location" at 12(9). The England and Wales versions were read separately: the extent note records that a separate version exists for each, and paragraph (6A) appears as omitted in the Wales version.
• The Building Regulations 2010, regulation 20 — application of the self-certification route at 20(1); acceptance of a certificate as evidence at 20(2); the thirty-day duty to give the occupier a copy and to notify the building control authority at 20(3); retrievable storage by the authority at 20(3A).
• The Building Regulations 2010, Schedule 4 — descriptions of work requiring no building notice or full-plans application. Both extent versions were read. In the England version, paragraphs 1(a) to (e) appear as omitted (by SI 2012/3119, reg. 32(a)(i), with effect from 6 April 2013). In the Wales version, paragraphs 1(a) to (e) are present, inserted with effect from 8 June 2018 by The Building Regulations &c. (Amendment) (Excepted Energy Buildings) (Wales) Regulations 2018 (S.I. 2018/558), regs. 1(2), 16(1)(a). Paragraph 1(g)(ii) cross-refers to regulation 12(6A).
• The Building Regulations &c. (Amendment) Regulations 2012 (SI 2012/3119) — the amending instrument that inserted regulation 12(6A) with effect from 6 April 2013 for England, together with the legislation.gov.uk editorial note recording that the amendment has not applied in relation to Wales since 8 June 2018.
• The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/2451), regulation 3 — the general competence duty at 3(1); the requirement at 3(3) for membership of a class of persons approved by the Health and Safety Executive; the two carve-outs at 3(4)(a) and (b). The preamble records that the Regulations were made under sections 15 and 82(3)(a) of, and Schedule 3 to, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
• Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, s.84 — s.84(1), providing that the Act, subject to narrow exceptions, does not extend to Northern Ireland.
• Building (Scotland) Act 2003 (2003 asp 8), s.8 — the requirement for a building warrant granted under section 9, including for the provision of services, fittings or equipment in or in connection with a building.
• The Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (SSI 2004/406) — made by the Scottish Ministers under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003, confirming that Scotland operates a separate building standards system.
• Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, s.1 — the compulsory duty and its application to employers carrying on business in Great Britain.

Scope of insurance statements, and limitations

Statements about policy terms — defective workmanship exclusions, care custody and control, contractual liability, tools-in-vehicle conditions, product liability, gradually operating causes, and the claims-made versus claims-occurring distinction — describe general market practice across UK trade liability policies. They are not universal, and no specific insurer's wording is described. Where this guide says wordings vary, that is a deliberate statement of fact.

Two limitations are recorded deliberately. Regulation 25 of SI 2015/51 (energy distribution installations) is relevant to excavation near buried services and was identified in the arrangement of regulations, but its full text was not retrieved for this edition and no claim is made about its content. And this guide does not address Scottish or Northern Irish variations in building control or party wall procedure; the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 extends to England and Wales.

Conclusion

Fourteen trades, one framework, and two beliefs that are the wrong way round.

The first is that CDM is for large commercial sites. Regulation 2 names redecoration, fitting out, renovation, repair and upkeep as construction work, and regulation 7 puts specified client duties on the contractor whenever the client is a homeowner. If you fit kitchens, lay carpets or paint hallways for private clients, the Regulations are describing you. The second runs the other way: breaching them is not, by itself, something you can be sued for, and your liability policy is aimed at the negligence claim rather than the HSE prosecution.

Between those two points sits everything practical. Where these trades genuinely differ is not in some general notion of risk but in specific statutory contact — the Party Wall etc. Act for anyone digging near a boundary, section 184 for anyone crossing a footway, Schedule 3 for anyone inside a self-certification scheme. Of everything here, the most useful habit is also the cheapest: photograph the property before you start, and write down what you were asked to do.

For related reading, see our Public Liability Insurance UK guide, our Contractors' All Risks Insurance UK guide for cover on the works themselves, and our Tradesman Insurance UK guide for an overview across the trades.