Insurance and indemnity arrangements on a construction site are where liability translates into money when something goes wrong. On paper, every contractor holds public liability, employer’s liability, professional indemnity and contract works cover to the levels specified by the contract. In practice, the interactions between those policies when a claim actually gets made are more complex than most developers appreciate until they need to test them.
Where multiple contractors are working on the same site with separate insurance arrangements, a defect or incident that touches more than one trade produces a coordination problem. Each insurer investigates the extent of their client’s contribution. Each contractor is incentivised to argue their responsibility is limited. The developer or principal contractor sits in the middle waiting for the parties to agree, often across months rather than weeks.
The Globe Group’s insurance arrangements are structured to reduce this coordination friction where multiple group businesses are on the same scheme. The group’s public liability, contract works and professional indemnity policies respond as a coordinated set rather than as separate policies from each business. Where a claim arises that involves more than one of the group’s activities, the developer deals with one insurance conversation rather than several.
That coordination matters most for incidents that genuinely sit at trade interfaces. Water ingress on a completed housing plot that may have arisen from roofing, from scaffold tie reinstatement, or from cavity wall construction. A drainage failure in year three that may have originated in the groundworks package or in the subsequent hard landscaping. A fall protection incident during roofing that involved both the scaffold and the netting installer. Each is a claim that under separate procurement takes months to resolve. Under group insurance coordination, it takes weeks.
There is also a policy-limit coordination benefit. When multiple contractors each carry, say, ten million pounds of public liability cover on the same scheme, and a serious incident produces a claim that exceeds one contractor’s limit, the aggregation questions that follow can be complex. The group’s insurance is structured to respond as an aggregated policy across the group’s activities, which simplifies both the claim response and the certainty for the developer.
For developers running framework relationships with the group across multiple schemes, the insurance certification is issued at the group level rather than as separate certificates from each business. That reduces the developer’s administrative overhead across the portfolio and gives a consistent view of the cover in place at any point in the programme.
There is a specific benefit around contractual indemnities as well. Standard construction contracts include indemnity clauses that transfer certain risks between the parties. Where a scheme has multiple contractors, the interaction between their several indemnity obligations can produce gaps or overlaps that show up when a claim tests them. The group’s contractual documentation is structured to align the indemnity positions across its constituent businesses, so those gaps do not exist.
None of this is exotic insurance engineering. It is the practical benefit of having one commercial and legal team responsible for the arrangements across the group’s activities rather than four separate teams working from different starting points. The developer benefits from that internal alignment without having to construct it themselves.
For QSs and developers evaluating group procurement against multi-package tendering, the insurance and indemnity coordination is one of the harder-to-quantify but genuinely valuable elements of the group offer. The cost of not having it does not usually appear until a specific incident tests the arrangements. At that point, the cost is real.
The right time to think about this is at contract stage, not at claim stage. Reviewing the insurance and indemnity arrangements of a group offer against the arrangements that would result from separate package tendering is a small piece of pre-contract work that can save significant post-incident cost.
Talk to the Globe Group To discuss insurance and indemnity coordination across trades on your scheme, contact the Globe Group on 01223 890727 or email enquiries@theglobegroup.co.uk.
