FCA authorised · FRN 7249520117 325 0027Quote & buy →
Barrow plastering is a solid-wall trade. The town was built quickly and on a grid for the shipyard, and what it built was dense terraced housing and tenement blocks in masonry — no cavity, lime plaster inside, render outside — standing on a peninsula that takes salt air and gales straight off the Irish Sea.
That combination produces the local problem. A solid wall handles water by absorbing it and letting it out again, and it needs a plaster and a render that will do the same. Put a dense cement render or a gypsum system on it and the moisture has nowhere to go: it moves sideways, comes through decoration, blows the plaster off the wall and shows up as damp somebody has to pay to fix.
So the exposure a plasterer carries here is rarely dropping a hawk of muck on a carpet. It is what you covered up, what you specified, and what happens to it after two winters of driven rain. Apex arranges cover that reflects solid-wall and coastal render work as it is actually done, placed by a named broker who will present the risk properly.
Barrow’s building stock and its exposure to Irish Sea weather concentrate a plasterer’s risk in the things that only show up long after the invoice.
Plastering disputes are slow. The work looks perfect, the money is paid, and eighteen months later there is damp at skirting level, salting on the wall or render drumming when you tap it. By then the argument is not about your finish but about what system was used and what was underneath it. That is professional indemnity ground, and it is the cover most often missing when a plasterer buys on price.
EWI on solid-wall housing carries obligations ordinary rendering does not. The system is certified as a whole, so beads, meshes, fixings and detailing all have to be the specified ones; fire performance matters on anything other than a low-rise house; and funded retrofit schemes add consumer-protection and guarantee requirements. Working outside the certified detail can void the warranty and remove the argument you would most want to run at claim, so it needs declaring rather than absorbing quietly into a general plastering policy.
Injury to other people and damage to their property arising from your work — material and water on floors, carpets and furnishings, damage caused while working in an occupied house or a shared block, and anything that comes off a scaffold onto a street. What it does not usually answer is a dispute about whether the system you applied was the right one, which is a different cover.
Substantially, and it needs declaring. External rendering on an exposed coast carries a weather and detailing exposure that internal plastering does not, and external wall insulation adds certified-system, fire-performance and guarantee obligations on top. Both are placeable, but on a policy written for internal plastering they are the sort of thing discovered at claim.
Tools and plant can be covered against theft from site, van or premises, subject to underwriter assessment of security and overnight storage, with hired-in mixers, spray plant and access equipment added where needed. Materials on site are usually a contract works question rather than a tools one.
Yes. The requirement covers labour-only sub-contractors working under your control, not just people on a payroll, so a labourer mixing for you by the day is caught by it.
It should, and it is worth saying so up front. Lime plastering and traditional render on older buildings is skilled remedial work where the reinstatement standard is higher and the materials are specified, so the same accident costs more. If a meaningful share of your work is in older solid-walled or listed stock, the limit should be set against that rather than against a modern house.
Because it is the most common route to an expensive, slow-arriving claim in this housing. A solid wall needs a breathable system; an impermeable one traps moisture and produces damp, salting and blown plaster later, usually across a whole elevation. The client is then not alleging bad workmanship but that you used the wrong system — a professional judgement, needing the cover that responds to professional judgements.
Tell us about your business and we’ll place it on the specialist market — or leave your number and a named broker calls you back, usually the same working day.
