Design & build

Insurance for landscape design-and-build businesses

In short: A landscape design-and-build business does two jobs that insurers treat as different trades: giving design and specification advice, which is a professional indemnity risk, and physically constructing gardens, which is a public liability and contract works risk. Policies bought through online forms almost always assume you do one or the other. A policy sold to a “landscaper” typically assumes no design work; one sold to a “landscape architect” typically assumes no construction. The document that decides which of your activities are covered is the schedule’s description of business — and for a design-and-build firm that description needs drafting, not selecting from a dropdown.

Two trades on one schedule

When you design a garden and then build it, you carry two distinct exposures under one roof. The design side — planting plans matched to soil and aspect, drainage schemes, levels, the specification of a retaining wall — is advice. If the advice is wrong and the client suffers a loss, that is a professional indemnity claim. The build side — excavation, hard landscaping, walling, decking, planting out — is physical work. If someone is injured or property is damaged, that is a public liability claim; if the works themselves are damaged before handover, that is contract works territory.

The trouble is that most insurance products are built for one trade at a time. A contractor's combined policy for a landscaper prices the digging and assumes someone else did the thinking. A professional indemnity policy for a landscape designer prices the thinking and assumes someone else does the digging. A design-and-build firm sits across the join, and the join is exactly where claims get argued.

Where design ends and workmanship begins

The classic design-and-build dispute is a garden that fails, with two possible explanations. The lawn that floods every winter: was the drainage scheme wrongly designed, or was a sound scheme badly installed? The retaining wall that leans after two seasons: was it under-specified for the loads behind it, or built off the drawing? The planting scheme that dies: wrong species for the conditions, or poor ground preparation?

If your policies were bought separately, from different insurers, on forms that each assumed the other trade didn’t exist, that question stops being academic. A public liability insurer can decline a claim it reads as a design failure; a PI insurer can decline one it reads as bad workmanship. The firm that did both jobs can end up covered for neither version of the same loss. The fix is not a clever legal argument after the event — it is a programme of cover arranged by someone who knew, from the start, that the same firm designs and constructs, with the design-and-construct point put to insurers in writing.

The label problem

Online forms ask you to pick a trade. “Landscape gardener” and “landscape architect” both appear on most lists; “landscape design-and-build” almost never does. Pick the first and your PI, if the product includes any at all, is usually a token limit intended for incidental advice — not for a firm whose drawings and specifications are the product clients are paying for. Pick the second and your liability cover may assume a studio practice that never lifts a spade, with no contract works element, no plant, and rating that falls apart the moment an insurer learns you operate excavators.

Neither label is dishonest. Both are wrong. The description of business on your schedule is the sentence an insurer reads first when a claim comes in, and if it says something narrower than what you actually do, everything you do outside it is unprotected. A broker’s job on a risk like this is to write that sentence so it covers the whole operation — design, specification, construction, maintenance — and to place it with an insurer that has agreed to all of it.

The physical risks are not standard either

Even on the construction side, landscaping carries features a generic tradesman's policy handles badly. Excavation means underground services: striking a water main, a gas pipe or a fibre run is one of the most frequent and expensive incidents in the trade, and insurers ask specific questions about depth of dig and service-location procedures. Tree work means working at height and, often, chainsaws — both of which are commonly excluded or restricted unless declared. Machinery matters too: owned plant needs cover in its own right, hired-in plant creates a contractual liability to the hire company, and both need to appear on the policy rather than being assumed.

Materials raise a quieter point. Plants, stone and timber that you supply are products, and there is a limited products liability angle when something you supplied — rather than something you did — causes damage. It rarely drives the placement, but it belongs in the description of what the business does.

People, premises and the seasonal workforce

Landscaping is seasonal, and most design-and-build firms flex their labour: a core team, plus subcontractors through the busy months. The legal distinction that matters is between bona fide subcontractors, who work under their own direction and carry their own insurance, and labour-only subcontractors, who work under yours and count as employees for insurance purposes. If anyone works under your direction — including labour-only subbies and casual seasonal hands — employers' liability is a legal requirement with a £5 million statutory minimum, and insurers expect the numbers declared accurately.

Premises are the other quiet exposure. Many firms run from home with a yard elsewhere: materials, tools and machinery stored at a yard need cover at that location, and tools in vehicles overnight are a standard theft flashpoint with conditions attached. None of this is exotic, but all of it needs to be on the schedule rather than assumed.

What good cover looks like for a design-and-build firm

The shape is usually: professional indemnity that expressly contemplates design for construction — not incidental advice cover; public liability and employers' liability rated for the real workforce and the real machinery; contract works cover for jobs in progress; owned and hired-in plant; tools and goods in transit; and a description of business that names design, specification and construction in the same sentence. Whether that is one combined policy or a small programme across two insurers matters less than the fact that every activity appears somewhere, in writing, before the claim rather than after it.

FAQ

I trade as a landscaper but I design most of the gardens I build. Do I really need PI?

If clients rely on your drawings, plans or specifications — and pay for the work partly because of them — you are giving professional advice, and a failure of that advice is a PI claim whether or not you also built the garden. A landscaper's liability policy will not respond to a pure design failure. The question is not whether you call yourself a designer; it is whether a claimant’s solicitor could.

My PI was sold for a landscape designer. Does it cover the construction side?

Almost certainly not — PI covers the consequences of negligent advice and design, not injury, property damage or damage to the works, which need public liability and contract works cover. More dangerously, a designer’s PI wording may have been priced on the basis that you do not construct at all, which is a disclosure problem as well as a gap.

Who pays when a garden fails and nobody knows if it was the design or the build?

That is precisely the design-and-construct seam. If your PI and liability covers were arranged together, with both insurers aware you do both, the claim gets handled and the insurers resolve the allocation. If they were arranged separately on inconsistent descriptions, each has an argument that the loss belongs to the other — and you sit in the middle. The time to fix that is at placement, not at claim.

Do my seasonal subcontractors need to be on my insurance?

Labour-only subcontractors — people who work under your direction using your materials and methods — count as employees: they must be within your employers' liability cover and declared in your wage figures. Bona fide subcontractors working under their own direction should carry their own liability insurance, and you should check it, because your policy will expect you to.

Design-and-build is a drafting job, not a dropdown

Tell us what the firm actually does — design, build, maintain — and we’ll put the whole of it in writing to the market.

Call 0117 325 0027 info@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). This page is general information, not advice on a specific policy.