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

Introduction

Twelve trades are covered here: bricklaying, carpentry, driveway contracting, fencing, glazing, plastering, general handyman work, painting and decorating, tiling, kitchen fitting, window fitting and carpet fitting. Written about one at a time, they produce twelve 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 twelve 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 headed "Self-certification Schemes and Exemptions from Requirement to Give Building Notice or Deposit Full Plans", and is referenced by regulations 12(6)(a) and 20(1). It is a two-column table: a type of work, and the description of person who may carry it out under the scheme. Several entries bear on the trades in this guide.

What registration under one of these schemes does is precise: it allows the registered person to self-certify the work, which is why Schedule 3 is headed as an exemption from the requirement to give a building notice or deposit full plans. It is a building-control mechanism.

The Twelve Trades: Where They Genuinely Differ

Everything above applies to all twelve. 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.

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.

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.

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 the separate registered regimes at Schedule 3 items 1 and 11 rather than being merely riskier. A handyman policy is unlikely to contemplate either. Our Plumber Insurance UK and Electrician Insurance UK guides cover those trades in their own right.

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.

Item 13 covers replacement windows, rooflights, roof windows and doors in existing dwellings, and names FENSA, BM Trada, the BSI, CERTASS and Network VEKA. 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 twelve 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 twelve 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); items 1, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 19 and the persons named in column 2.
• 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

Twelve 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.