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If your business lives by the harbour and the holiday season, your cover should be built around both — tell us how Wells works for you and we’ll place it properly.
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Reviewed by Apex Insurance Brokers · Last reviewed 2026-08-08
Wells is a working north Norfolk harbour before it is anything else. That single fact drives almost everything unusual about insuring a business here — from the flood excess on a quayside café to the business-interruption sum for a shop that does half its trade between the May and October half-terms. Here is how the town’s realities should change what you buy.
The sea that fills the harbour and brings the summer crowds is the same sea that has come over this coast in surge conditions before — 1953 and December 2013 are the years people here don’t need reminding of. Insurers price flood risk street by street, and low-lying premises near the quay can face higher flood excesses, restricted flood cover, or in some cases exclusions. Two points matter. First, be scrupulously accurate about flood history and any past claims on the premises: non-disclosure is the fastest way to a declined claim. Second, evidence counts. Flood boards, raised electrical sockets, stock stored off the floor, a written surge plan — documented resilience measures give a broker something concrete to negotiate with. Bear in mind that the Flood Re scheme, which helps households in flood-prone areas, does not broadly extend to business premises, so a well-argued case to commercial insurers is often what stands between you and an unaffordable excess.
A holiday-economy business in Wells doesn’t earn evenly across twelve months, and business-interruption cover set as a flat annual figure quietly ignores that. If a winter surge or a fire closes you from November, the cash-flow pain lands when the season opens and you’re still shut. Two adjustments are worth discussing. Make sure the interruption calculation reflects your seasonal pattern rather than a smoothed average, and look hard at the indemnity period: twelve months can be optimistic on this coast, where drying out, reinstatement and refitting a damaged building can push reopening past the start of the following season. A 24-month indemnity period often fits the reality better. The same seasonality applies to stock — if your stockholding doubles ahead of summer, a seasonal-increase provision stops you being underinsured in exactly the months a loss would hurt most.
From Easter to autumn the quay, the pavements and every café terrace in Wells are busy with people on holiday, many of them children. Public liability insurance is not a legal requirement — it’s a contractual and practical one — but in a town whose entire economy is footfall, trading without it is a genuine gamble, and many landlords, event organisers and local authorities will require it anyway. Employers’ liability is different: if you employ staff, it is compulsory under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, with a legal minimum of £5 million of cover. The seasonal hiring pattern here catches people out — students behind the counter for six summer weeks, casual kitchen help, a relative paid for weekend shifts. They generally count as employees for the purposes of the Act, whether or not they’re on a formal contract. If your headcount swells for the season, your insurer needs to know.
Much of Wells’s commercial building stock is older, traditionally built and, in parts of the town, subject to conservation constraints. Rebuilding to match traditional materials and methods costs considerably more than a standard modern reinstatement, and coastal construction costs run higher still — so a buildings sum insured carried over year after year is a common route to underinsurance, where an average clause can cut every claim proportionately. A proper reinstatement assessment is cheap by comparison. The salt air adds its own tax: external signage, refrigeration condensers, outdoor catering kit and anything mechanical facing the harbour corrodes faster than inland, which argues for realistic maintenance and replacement-cost assumptions rather than hopeful ones. And for the builders, plumbers and electricians kept busy by holiday lets and second homes along this coast, the priorities are practical — tools cover that actually responds to theft from vans, contract works cover for refurbishment jobs, and public liability at the level holiday-let managing agents typically demand before you set foot on site.
To be clear about who we are: Apex Insurance Brokers is based in Bristol, and we don’t have an office in Wells-next-the-Sea — we arrange cover for clients across the UK, including north Norfolk. What matters for a Wells business is not where the broker sits but whether the policy reflects surge exposure, seasonal income and coastal reinstatement costs, and whether someone will argue your corner with underwriters on flood terms. That is the job we do. You can read more about our approach on our commercial insurance page.
Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). This article is general information, not advice on a specific policy.
