0117 325 0027 · info@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk
FCA FRN 724952 · Co. No. 07014570 · Bristol
§ Commercial insurance

Charity insurance - UK broker guide

Apex Insurance Brokers · Last reviewed: June 2026

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 724952. Companies House 07014570. Cover availability and terms depend on insurer underwriting at the time of quotation.

This page is for the trustees, CEOs, finance leads and operations managers of registered charities, social enterprises, CICs, faith organisations, hospices and grant-funded voluntary groups across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff and the wider South West. If your charity holds property, employs staff or volunteers, fundraises in public, works with children or vulnerable adults, or handles donor data, the cover you place isn't a tick-box exercise. The Charity Commission's CC49 guidance is explicit that trustees can be held personally liable for the consequences of their decisions.

A typical claim we handle for a charity client doesn't look like a high-street SME claim. It's a safeguarding allegation reaching back fifteen years. It's a trustee named personally in a regulatory investigation into reserves policy. It's a listed church roof torn off in a Severn storm and the heritage rebuild cost three times the sum insured. It's a volunteer injured at a sponsored abseil and the public liability policy excluding "events". Generic SME cover doesn't anticipate any of this. A bespoke charity programme placed with a specialist insurer does.

Apex is a Bristol-headquartered independent commercial broker, currently ranked first in Bristol for Professional Indemnity insurance and now placing the wider commercial book across the South West. We work with charities from grassroots voluntary groups up to multi-site charities with regional property estates and complex safeguarding regimes.

What charity insurance is

"Charity insurance" isn't a single product. It's a programme of covers stitched together to protect the assets of the charity, the people who run it, the people it serves, and the regulatory permissions that let it operate. Most charities buy a Charity Combined or Commercial Combined policy as the spine, then bolt on trustee indemnity, abuse and molestation, fundraising event extensions, professional liability for any clinical or advisory work, and cyber. The whole programme then sits inside the trustees' broader duty of care under Charity Commission CC3 (the essential trustee), CC8 (managing risk) and CC26 (charity reserves).

The UK charity insurance market has a small number of specialist insurers. Markel, Ecclesiastical (now trading as Benefact), Ansvar (the former Allchurches mutual), Aviva Charity, Zurich Municipal and a handful of Lloyd's syndicates carry most of the appetite. Ecclesiastical and Ansvar have deep roots in church and faith-based property; Markel writes a lot of children's, hospice and social-care charity. Aviva and Zurich take larger composite risks. Below a certain size, charities can use off-the-shelf SME packages from Hiscox, Aviva Fast Trade or AXA's broker schemes, but the line at which that stops being safe is lower than most trustees think. Once you have paid staff, occupy heritage property, run regulated activities (Ofsted, CQC), handle child or vulnerable-adult beneficiaries, or run public fundraising events, you've crossed into bespoke territory.

What a broker actually does for a charity client: we present the risk to specialist underwriters who won't deal direct, we challenge inner limits that quietly cap your real exposure, we advocate at claim stage when the wording is contested, and we prepare renewal 60–90 days out so you aren't presenting a hardening market with three days to spare.

The covers you actually need

Trustee Indemnity Insurance (TI / TIL) — must-have

Trustees of a charity can be sued personally. If the charity is unincorporated, that personal liability is unlimited — the trustees' own homes are in scope. Even where the charity is incorporated (a CLG or a CIO), trustees can be pursued individually for breaches of trust, regulatory breaches, wrongful trading equivalents, and decisions that turn out badly. Trustee Indemnity covers the legal defence costs and (within limits) damages and settlements. It does not, and cannot, cover deliberate wrongdoing, fines and penalties imposed by a regulator, or the cost of putting right a loss the trustees personally caused through dishonesty. The Charities Act 2011 s.189 permits the charity to pay the premium provided the governing document allows it and the trustees follow the CC49 procedure. We recommend limits of £1m to £5m for most charities; larger national charities with reserves above £5m should look at £10m. Premium drivers: reserves level, regulated activities, fundraising methods, prior Charity Commission interventions, related-party transactions.

Abuse & Molestation (A&M) cover — must-have for any charity working with children or vulnerable adults

This is the cover that catches trustees out. Most generic Public Liability policies exclude abuse and molestation entirely; you need an explicit A&M extension or a standalone policy. The critical wording question is claims-made versus occurrence basis. An occurrence policy responds to an incident that happened during the policy period, regardless of when the claim arrives. A claims-made policy responds to claims notified during the policy period, with a retrospective date determining how far back covered acts can stretch. Lose continuous occurrence cover for one renewal and you create a permanent gap. Move to claims-made with a tight retro date and historic exposures fall outside cover. We model this at every renewal. Underwriting questions are detailed: DBS Enhanced check schedule, safeguarding lead identity, training cycle, supervision ratios, lone-working protocols, whistleblowing procedure, and incident-reporting culture.

Employers' Liability — must-have, must extend to volunteers

Statutory minimum is £5m; market standard is £10m. The single most-missed point in charity EL cover: the policy must explicitly extend to volunteers. Most modern wordings do, but read it. A volunteer treated as if they were an employee under HSE law (which is how the HSE views unpaid workers in practice) needs to fall inside the EL definition or you have a serious gap. Confirm cover for trustees acting in operational capacity, for volunteers under 18 if you have them, and for work-experience placements.

Public & Products Liability — must-have

£5m as a working minimum; £10m where you occupy public premises, run fundraising events, or interact with the general public. £25m for large hospice or housing-support charities, or where any contract (local authority, NHS, lottery funder) requires it. Watch for inner limits on events, work-away cover, and exclusions for adventurous activities. If you run sponsored marathons, abseils, fire-walks, skydives or fireworks displays, those need to be specifically declared and rated — most base policies exclude them.

Property — material damage and business interruption

Charity property covers everything from a single rented office to a regional estate of charity shops, day centres, hospices and listed places of worship. Key issues: rebuild cost on listed and heritage buildings is routinely two to four times an architect's like-for-like estimate; volunteer-occupied buildings are treated as higher-risk by some insurers (assumption of less rigorous fire and security management); charity shop chains need a schedule with proper COPE (Construction, Occupancy, Protection, Exposure) data. Business interruption should be costed on a gross revenue basis including grant income, donations and trading income. Indemnity period: 24 months minimum for any charity with a major fundraising cycle or grant-dependent income.

Money — should-have

Sunday collection cover, charity-shop till floats, cash-handling at fundraising events, paying-in journey to the bank. Most generic SME policies cap money cover at £2,500 in transit and £5,000 on premises out of hours. For a parish church taking £500 a week in cash and banking weekly, or a charity shop chain pulling £15,000 across a Saturday, those limits aren't enough.

Fundraising events extension — should-have

A blanket extension for events run by the charity, with sub-limits for specific risks (raffles and lotteries, which need Gambling Commission registration above certain thresholds; fireworks; bouncy castles; sponsored challenge events). If you run a flagship event (a Christmas market, a sponsored bike ride, a black-tie ball), declare it specifically.

Cyber — should-have, moving towards must-have

Charities hold donor data, Gift Aid declarations, Direct Debit mandates, beneficiary case files (often sensitive personal data including children's records, mental health histories, immigration status). The ICO has not been gentle with charity sector breaches. Cover should include first-party costs (forensics, notification, credit monitoring, PR), third-party liability, ransomware/extortion, and business interruption from system outage. Fundraising platform liability — if your CRM or Just Giving-equivalent platform is breached and donor cards exposed — should be specifically addressed.

Professional Indemnity — sector-dependent

Mental health charities running counselling services need PI covering counsellors and clinical supervisors; advocacy charities advising on benefits, immigration or housing law need PI for the advice itself; charities issuing reports or research need PI covering reliance by third parties. £1m to £5m depending on the type of advice and the cohort relying on it.

Engineering inspection — situation-dependent

If you operate lifts, hoists (common in hospices and day centres), passenger lifts in listed church towers, pressure vessels or air-conditioning, statutory inspection under LOLER and PSSR is required and the policy should include the inspection contract.

Sector-specific risks we see most

Historic safeguarding allegations

The pattern is consistent. A complaint surfaces ten, fifteen, twenty years after the event, often after a documentary, a public inquiry or an unrelated criminal case. The charity has changed insurer three times since. The first question is which policy responds. We've seen claims that turn entirely on a single endorsement from a renewal six insurers ago. Keep every wording, every endorsement, every renewal schedule. We hold a continuous-cover file for every charity client we place.

Trustee personal exposure on reserves and financial controls

CC26 reserves guidance and CC8 risk management aren't abstract. Where a charity runs out of money and trustees are accused of having traded while knowingly insolvent, the Charity Commission opens a regulatory inquiry and trustees lawyer up individually. A typical claim looks like £80,000 to £200,000 in defence costs across two years before any finding. Trustee Indemnity with proper defence cost extension is what funds that defence.

Listed-building heritage rebuild gap

A parish church takes a roof-strike from a winter storm. Like-for-like rebuild quoted by the diocesan surveyor is £900,000. Actual heritage rebuild — Welsh slate, lead flashings, original timber, listed-building consent, archaeological watching brief — comes in at £2.4m. This is why Ecclesiastical and Ansvar dominate church property: they index-link to heritage rebuild specifications, not standard build costs. We recommend formal RICS reinstatement valuations every three to five years for any listed-building charity.

Fundraising event injuries and missing event extensions

A sponsored marathon volunteer trips on a marshal's bollard and suffers a serious back injury. The PL policy excludes "organised events" with more than 250 participants. The charity carries the claim. Or: a fireworks display at a hospice family fundraiser, no specific fireworks extension declared, no professional pyrotechnician contract, claim by a parent of an injured child denied. Both have happened. Both were preventable with five minutes of disclosure at renewal.

Volunteer EL exclusion

A volunteer at a charity shop is helping unload a delivery and is injured by a falling pallet. The EL wording extends only to "employees", undefined. Litigation runs for eighteen months before a compromise settlement. Most modern wordings capture volunteers explicitly, but legacy policies, trade-body schemes and some membership-organisation policies still have gaps. We check the volunteer extension at every fresh placement.

Cyber — donor data and Gift Aid

A charity's CRM is compromised. Donor records including bank details, Gift Aid declarations and case-file narratives are exfiltrated. ICO notification is required within 72 hours. Forensic investigation, notification of 18,000 donors and PR support quickly run past £100,000. None of that is covered under a standard SME cyber policy with a £25,000 sub-limit. We size cyber cover to the donor base and the regulated data load.

Bristol & South West considerations

Bristol has one of the densest third-sector clusters in England outside London. Voscur, Aid Box Community, St Mungo's Bristol, the Bristol & Avon Chinese Women's Group and Quartet Community Foundation between them touch a substantial share of the city's funded charity activity. Bath & North East Somerset's 3SG infrastructure body, Cardiff's WCVA-affiliated network, and Cheltenham's philanthropy ecosystem (Sue Ryder at Leckhampton Court, Cobalt Health, James Hopkins Trust) all sit inside our 50-mile catchment.

Church of England property is a significant part of the regional charity insurance market. The Dioceses of Bristol, Bath & Wells, Gloucester and Salisbury between them oversee hundreds of listed places of worship. Ecclesiastical and Ansvar dominate that book but where parish councils, friends groups or diocesan trading subsidiaries want a market check, we present alternatives. The hospice cluster is unusually strong locally: St Peter's Hospice in Bristol, Dorothy House at Winsley, Sue Ryder at Leckhampton and Marie Curie's Cardiff hospice all sit in our patch, with their associated charity shop chains spread across the South West. Hospice risk combines clinical PI exposure, end-of-life safeguarding, retail liability, fundraising events at scale and major property estates.

Geographic risk also bears on charity cover. The Severn flood plain affects charity property at Avonmouth, Portishead, Sharpness, parts of Bridgwater and the Cardiff Bay redevelopment area; flood mapping is a renewal conversation, not an afterthought. Glastonbury Festival draws hundreds of South West-based Oxfam stewards each summer; the volunteer EL question matters when those volunteers come back home and report injuries weeks later.

How to get it right at renewal

Start 60 to 90 days before renewal. The charity insurance market has hardened since the IICSA findings on institutional abuse, and again with the wider cyber-claims trend. Underwriters who used to turn quotes in a week now ask second and third rounds of questions. A late presentation to a hardening market is the single most common reason a charity ends up with poor terms.

What underwriters want to see: recent annual accounts and trustees' report; safeguarding policy and incident register; DBS Enhanced check schedule; safeguarding lead and reporting chain; the CC8 risk register; the CC26 reserves policy; property schedule with COPE data; volunteer numbers and management; fundraising event diary; cyber posture (MFA, backups, incident response plan, training, EDR). For trustee indemnity, we present the constitution confirming s.189 permission, the related-party register, and any regulatory correspondence with the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI.

Claims history is the load-bearing piece of any presentation. We pull loss runs from every incumbent and prior insurer, reconcile them line by line, and separate open from closed. An incumbent showing three open claims at £15,000 each reserves £45,000 of contingent exposure; if those have settled or been withdrawn, the loss ratio drops materially. We chase closure paperwork and present a current picture.

Photos of premises, especially listed and heritage buildings. Recent fire-risk assessments. Alarm grading (Grade 2 monitored as minimum; dual-path for higher-value heritage). Safeguarding training cycle. Cyber controls — MFA on email, segregated backups tested in the last twelve months, EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Defender for Business or equivalent), phishing simulation programme.

Where multi-quoting helps: when the incumbent has hardened terms without a claims reason; when you've added a regulated activity; when the charity has merged or restructured. Where it hurts: with a small specialist market, approaching three insurers simultaneously without broker coordination can leave you with three declines and a market that talks to itself. We coordinate the approach.

How Apex helps

Apex is independent, FCA-authorised (FRN 724952) and works with broad market access to the charity-specialist panel — Markel, Ecclesiastical/Benefact, Ansvar, Aviva Charity, Zurich Municipal, and the relevant Lloyd's syndicates — alongside the wider commercial market. We are Bristol-headquartered but place charity programmes across the 50-mile catchment: Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon, Yeovil, Taunton, Wells, Stroud and the towns in between.

What we actually do at renewal: read the constitution and confirm trustee indemnity is permitted; pressure-test the safeguarding submission before it goes to market; model A&M cover on both occurrence and claims-made bases and explain the trade-offs in writing; rebenchmark heritage rebuild sums insured; challenge inner limits that don't fit your reality; run the timeline to 60–90 days out so you have options. At claim stage we advocate. We treat brokerage as a craft.

To talk about your charity's renewal, speak to us in Bristol. We'll look at your current programme, identify gaps and tell you honestly whether the market can offer better than what you're holding.

FAQs

Do trustees of a charity need trustee indemnity insurance?

Not by law. But trustees can be sued personally for decisions taken in their capacity as trustees, and the Charities Act 2011 s.189 specifically permits the charity to buy cover for them provided the governing document allows it and CC49 procedure is followed. Almost every charity over £100,000 turnover that we work with holds TIL.

What's the difference between claims-made and occurrence-based abuse cover?

Occurrence cover responds to acts that occurred during the policy period, regardless of when the claim is reported — so a 1990s incident reported today is covered by the 1990s policy. Claims-made cover responds to claims notified during the policy period, with a retrospective date determining how far back covered acts can stretch. Both work; the implications at policy change are very different and we model them at every renewal.

Are volunteers covered by Employers' Liability insurance?

In most modern wordings, yes — but only if the policy explicitly extends EL to volunteers. Some legacy and trade-body policies don't, and the gap can be serious. We confirm volunteer EL extension on every charity placement.

Do I need a separate fundraising events policy?

Usually not — a fundraising event extension on the main liability policy is the standard approach. Specific high-risk events (fireworks displays, sponsored extreme challenges, large public gatherings) need to be declared individually and may need bolt-on cover.

How much does charity insurance cost in the UK?

It depends on size, activity, property, beneficiary group and claims history. A small unincorporated voluntary group might place a combined programme for under £1,000 a year; a multi-site charity with a hospice, retail estate and children's services will be looking at five to six figures depending on reserves and limits. We give honest indications after a proper conversation.

Is the Charity Commission going to penalise us for not having insurance?

The Charity Commission doesn't require insurance per se, but trustees have a duty under CC8 to manage risk, and the absence of basic property and liability cover where it's available would be hard to defend at a regulatory inquiry. CC49 specifically addresses trustee indemnity and is worth reading.

Can a CIC buy the same insurance as a registered charity?

Largely yes — the CIC Regulator's framework is separate from the Charity Commission, but most of the cover types are the same. Trustee indemnity is replaced by directors' & officers' (D&O) liability for the CIC directors. We place both.

How long does a charity insurance quote take?

For a small standard risk, two to three weeks once we have the submission complete. For a complex multi-site charity with safeguarding exposure, six to eight weeks is realistic — and we want 60–90 days from incumbent expiry to do it properly.

Do you place charity insurance outside Bristol?

Yes. We place charity programmes across Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon, Yeovil, Taunton, Wells, Stroud and the wider 50-mile catchment. Many of our charity clients are diocesan, regional or national in footprint.

What if our charity has had a serious safeguarding incident?

We can still place cover, but the market will ask detailed questions about what changed and how. Honest disclosure is critical. We've placed charities through challenging renewals after serious incidents; what doesn't work is concealment, which becomes a non-disclosure issue and voids cover.

Does cyber insurance cover donor data breaches?

A properly structured charity cyber policy does, including notification costs, forensics, ICO regulatory defence, third-party liability and (within limits) extortion. Standard SME cyber policies often cap inside limits that don't reflect the donor data load — we size cyber to the actual exposure.

Does our charity shop chain need separate property cover?

Usually it sits inside the Charity Combined property schedule with a location-by-location specification. For very large chains (15+ shops) a standalone retail property and BI policy can be more efficient.

Other sectors we cover

Coverage area

Apex places charity and not-for-profit insurance for clients across the Bristol & South West region, working from our base in Bristol out across Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon and the market towns of Somerset and Wiltshire. Our wider commercial programme is described on the pillar page at /commercial-insurance-bristol-and-south-west/, with location-specific commercial broking detail at /locations/bristol-commercial-insurance/, /locations/bath-commercial-insurance/, /locations/cheltenham-commercial-insurance/, /locations/gloucester-commercial-insurance/, /locations/cardiff-commercial-insurance/ and /locations/wells-commercial-insurance/ for the diocesan and hospice cluster.

SEO metadata

Our service promise. We acknowledge every quote request the same working day. For straightforward risks, indicative terms typically follow within five working days. Complex risks — higher-risk buildings, cladding, mid-term proposals requiring fresh underwriting — may take longer; we’ll send you a progress note by the end of the fifth working day in those cases.
★ 4.0 on Trustpilot (verified)|Listed on the ARB PI broker list|FCA FRN 724952