Placing PI for a Fire-Safety and Cladding Remediation Specialist

Some risks are hard to place because they are bad. Others are hard to place because of what they are called. Fire-safety and cladding remediation work sits firmly in the second category: firms doing some of the most societally necessary construction work in Britain — making buildings safe — routinely find that the words “cladding” or “fire safety” on a submission produce declinatures before anyone has read page two. We recently completed a £400,000 placement for a fire-safety and cladding remediation specialist — a class of risk much of the market declines to quote — placed through careful presentation to the right specialist underwriters. That is the placement. The rest of this page is about the general problem it illustrates, because that problem is shared by every firm working in this space.

Why the market retreated from cladding and fire-safety risk

The retreat is a matter of industry record. After the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the construction PI market absorbed a wave of cladding-related notifications and a fundamental repricing of fire-safety exposure. Insurers responded the way insurers respond to a loss event whose ultimate size they cannot yet measure: they restricted. Cladding and fire-safety exclusions spread across construction PI wordings, capacity for anything façade-related contracted sharply, and whole categories of work moved from “rated” to “declined”. The subsequent legal landscape — including the Building Safety Act 2022’s dramatic extension of limitation periods for building-safety defects — lengthened the tail on historic work and reinforced the caution.

The irony is well known within the market and invisible outside it: remediation specialists — the firms fixing the problem — get caught by underwriting filters designed for the firms that created it. A keyword-level view of risk cannot distinguish a business that installed combustible cladding a decade ago from one that exists to remove it. Mainstream underwriting operates at scale, and at scale, keywords are the filter. That is not a moral failing; it is a structural one — and it defines what a broker has to do about it.

What “careful presentation” means in practice

A risk that triggers automatic declinature cannot be placed by submitting a proposal form and hoping. It has to be presented — which means building the case an underwriter would build for themselves if they had the time. Three elements carry most of the weight. First, scope definition: precisely what the firm does and — just as important — what it does not. Survey and specification versus installation; remediation of existing defects versus original design; which duties are assumed under which contract forms. An underwriter who can see the exact boundary of the risk can price it; one who cannot will decline it, because ambiguity in this class is always read against the applicant.

Second, the claims narrative. A clean record needs to be evidenced, not asserted. A record with notifications needs each matter explained: what happened, what it cost, what changed afterwards. Underwriters in difficult classes read claims history as a test of candour as much as a test of frequency — a submission that explains its history persuades; one that buries it confirms the suspicion the class already attracts.

Third, risk management evidence: the qualifications and accreditations the firm holds, how work is contracted, supervised and signed off, what the firm declines to take on, and how it documents decisions on site. In a class where the market’s starting assumption is negative, this material does the work that a good loss ratio does in an ordinary class — it gives the underwriter something to write down in support of saying yes.

Why specialist underwriters exist for declined classes

When mainstream capacity withdraws from a class, the risks do not disappear — the pricing power moves. Specialist underwriters occupy exactly this ground: classes where standard filters say no, but where careful individual underwriting can distinguish good risks from bad. They exist because a blanket declinature by the wider market guarantees that some well-run firms are being refused cover they merit, and insuring precisely those firms — at terms reflecting the class — is a viable business for an underwriter willing to do the reading. The cost of that model is that it only works through detailed submissions: a specialist underwriter’s advantage is judgement, and judgement needs material to work on. Which closes the loop — the presentation described above is not decoration around a difficult placement; it is the mechanism that makes the specialist market function at all. A broker’s job in a declined class is to know which underwriters genuinely have appetite, and to arrive with the evidence their judgement requires.

If you work in fire safety or remediation

The practical lessons generalise. Expect the keyword problem and plan around it: never let your risk reach the market described in one line. Keep the evidence file current — accreditations, procedures, contract standards, claims explanations — because it is your submission’s raw material. Start renewals early; specialist placements take longer than commodity ones. And treat a string of declinatures as information about presentation and market selection, not necessarily about your firm: in this class, the difference between declined and placed is very often the difference between being filtered and being read.

Frequently asked questions

Why do insurers decline fire-safety work without even quoting?

Because post-Grenfell losses and the lengthened limitation regime made the class expensive to assess case by case, most mainstream insurers filter it out at the submission stage rather than spend underwriting time on it. The declinature is usually a policy about the class, not a judgement about your firm — which is exactly why presentation to underwriters who do assess the class individually changes the outcome.

What should a remediation specialist prepare before approaching the market?

A precise scope statement covering what the firm does and does not do; contract forms and the duties assumed under them; accreditations and competence evidence; supervision and sign-off procedures; and a candid, explained claims history. That file is the placement — the broker’s market knowledge decides who reads it, but its quality decides what they conclude.

Will cover in this class always cost more than ordinary construction PI?

The class carries a genuine risk premium and terms reflect that — but the spread between a filtered risk and a well-presented one is unusually wide here. Firms move from unquotable to insurable, and from punitive terms to proportionate ones, on the strength of presentation and market selection. Every risk is different; the constant is that in a declined class, nothing about the outcome is standard.

Details anonymised to protect client confidentiality; outcomes vary with the risk.

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). Every risk is different: nothing on this page is advice on your own programme, and outcomes depend on your firm’s circumstances and the market at the time.