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Roofing in Exeter means moving between two quite different building stocks in the same week. The city centre was heavily bombed in 1942 and largely rebuilt afterwards, so a great deal of the commercial core carries flat and shallow-pitched roofs from the 1950s and 60s that have been re-covered several times over. Ten minutes out, you are on Devon slate over Victorian terraces in St Thomas or Heavitree, or in a village working next to cob walls and thatch.
The exposure that hurts is not the height. It is what water does to an occupied building once you have opened its roof, and what a torch does on a re-cover when the deck below is older than anyone remembers. Devon gets a genuinely wet year off the Atlantic, and the dry windows are short.
Apex is a Bristol-based commercial broker. We arrange roofing cover around the way the work actually runs here — flat-roof re-covers over trading premises, slate on period terraces, and hot works within reach of combustible fabric — placed by a named broker who will put the risk to insurers who write the trade properly.
Exeter is a small cathedral city with a rebuilt commercial centre, older residential suburbs and a rural hinterland of cob, stone and thatch. Each of those produces a different roofing risk.
A high-rainfall working year. Devon takes weather straight off the Atlantic and the dry spells are short. Programmes slip, roofs stay open longer than planned, and temporary covering does more work here than it does in the east of the country. Contract works cover and the way you sheet down are both worth more attention because of it.
Wind coming up the Exe valley. Storms funnel inland and reach the city with force. Loose materials on a scaffold, unsecured sheeting and stacked slate all become someone else’s problem when a front arrives overnight.
Trading premises underneath. Re-covering a flat roof over a shop, a pub or an office means the client’s stock, fit-out and takings are directly beneath your work. That raises both the size of a water-ingress claim and the chance of a business interruption argument attached to it.
Work at Height Regulations 2005 duties — edge protection, roof ladders and crawling boards, and a written method for every job that leaves the ground.
Fragile-surface duties — rooflights, cement sheet and corroded profiled decking are where most roofing falls actually happen, and underwriters ask how you deal with them.
Hot-works permit and fire-watch conditions imposed by insurers wherever torch-on felt, bitumen boilers or heat guns are used. The fire watch after you pack up is the condition most often broken.
CDM 2015 duties on larger contracts — you may hold principal contractor duties on a re-roof that involves more than one trade.
Scheme membership evidence — NFRC, CompetentRoofer or equivalent, where you hold it, along with your Building Regulations notification route for re-covering work.
Water gets past a temporary covering overnight and reaches the shop trading beneath a flat roof you are re-covering — public liability, with the client’s stock and interruption losses in play.
A torch-on re-cover ignites old timber or trapped bitumen in a deck nobody had opened up — a hot-works claim, decided on whether the permit and fire watch were kept.
Hot work in a village puts a spark within reach of thatch or dry cob — the severity here is out of all proportion to the size of the job.
A crew member falls through a fragile rooflight on an industrial re-cover — employers’ liability, RIDDOR and an HSE investigation.
Storm damage to a partly stripped roof before hand-over — contract works, subject to how the roof was left and secured.
Access equipment and gas bottles taken from a yard or an unattended site — tools cover, subject to security conditions.
It changes the hot-works side of it most. Re-covering means torch or bitumen work on a deck whose history you cannot verify, often over a trading business. We make sure hot works are properly declared, that the permit and fire-watch conditions are ones you can actually keep, and that the public liability limit reflects what is underneath the roof.
It needs to be raised rather than discovered at claim stage. Proximity to thatch or cob changes the fire exposure enormously, and some wordings restrict hot works within a set distance of combustible construction. Told up front, it is usually manageable; found afterwards, it is a coverage argument.
Contract works cover is there for your own work in progress against storm and water damage before the job is handed over. In a wet Devon programme where roofs stay open, it earns its keep — but it will look at how the roof was secured, so temporary covering and overnight sheeting matter.
On developer and main-contractor work it is common, and it is usually a contract requirement rather than an underwriting one. It is generally straightforward to arrange; the more useful conversation is whether the rest of the contract puts obligations on you that your policy does not actually cover.
Work at height and hot works together produce the kind of claims mainstream insurers would rather avoid, so a lot of them decline the trade on the code alone. It is a market-access issue, and it is exactly what a specialist broker exists to solve.
For compulsory employers’ liability purposes, yes — if they work under your direction, on your job, with your equipment. Only genuinely independent contractors working to their own methods fall outside it, and the distinction is worth getting right.
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.
