Site insurance is there to protect you when something unforeseen happens during the build. All building works and materials are covered up to the sum insured, public liability, employer liability, legal expenses, personal accident cover, personal possessions and employee tools.

It’s required for mortgage purposes but the main thing is that if something goes wrong and which affects your build cashflow and you don’t have insurance, you’ll struggle to keep works going, and a stationary build very often becomes a failed build. Whereas if you can claim against insurance and get the cash back that you’ve lost, you’re far more likely to complete your home.

Think of it this way, if you’re putting your life savings into this project, you need to know that you’re protected financially if anything should go wrong. It’s really a value added product providing essential protection.

Public liability insurance protects against damage or loss to any third party on the building site or in the surrounding area, for example a parked car at the entrance of the site. It essentially protects against damage, accident or injury to anyone or anyone else’s property.

Employer liability is there to protect you if any sub-contractors you’ve hired have an accident and injury themselves onsite, as you effectively are their employer.

The sum insured should reflect the rebuild cost of the property should it suffer a total loss. It’s important to take into consideration the cost for site clearance, for example if there was a fire, you’d have to professionally clear the site and then start again. Also, you can’t base the cost on any works you’d be doing yourself or getting help from family or friends to do, the rebuild cost would be based on how much a main contractor would charge to complete the build. Often the sum insured is around the rebuild cost of the property plus a 20% contingency.

It’s always a good idea to have public liability cover in place from the moment you take ownership of the site, and full site insurance cover ready for works to start.

Your builder’s insurance policy is in place to protect them, not you. Quite often builders say that they are fully insured, but in fact, they only have public liability insurance, which means you wouldn’t be covered if your timber frame was to collapse.

Even if they are insured, what happens if you have a major dispute and have to sue your builder to pay for damage onsite? This will be very time consuming, halt progress onsite completely and incur significant costs.

Whereas if you have your own policy, should anything go wrong, you can make a straightforward claim and keep your build moving.

All of the self build lenders accept our policy as standard. We are AA rated which means that were providing a quality product.