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Roofing out of Taunton covers a very wide geography for a town of its size. The county town sits in the vale between the Quantocks and the Blackdowns, and a working week runs from Georgian and Victorian frontages in the centre, out to villages of cob, stone and thatch on the hills, and down to the distribution and light-industrial sheds strung along the M5.
Those three jobs carry three different severe risks, and none of them is the one people expect. In town it is water into a trading building. In the villages it is a gas torch anywhere near thatch. On the sheds it is a foot through a fragile rooflight. Atlantic weather ties it all together: a wet, mild year with real storms in it, which keeps a Somerset roofer in storm-damage call-outs and short of dry windows to finish anything properly.
Apex is a Bristol-based commercial broker. We arrange roofing cover for firms working across that mix, placed by a named broker who will describe the risk to insurers rather than let it be judged on trade code alone.
Taunton is a market and county town with a compact older centre, large modern estates around it, a rural catchment of traditional construction and a motorway corridor of large modern sheds. The roofing risk changes completely between them.
A wet, mild year with real storms in it. Somerset takes weather off the Atlantic and the working year is a run of short dry windows. Roofs stay open longer than planned and temporary covering does a lot of the heavy lifting, which is exactly what contract works cover and overnight sheeting are for.
Storm-chasing and emergency repairs. After a named storm the phone does not stop, and the work is done fast, in poor conditions, often on damaged roofs that nobody has surveyed. Emergency and temporary repair work carries a higher chance of both injury and a later dispute about what was and was not made good.
Low-lying ground and flood-conscious clients. The town sits on the Tone in a low-lying vale with a long history of flooding, and clients here are unusually sensitive to any water entering a building. An ingress that a homeowner elsewhere would shrug at gets escalated quickly.
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.
Hot work in a village puts a spark within reach of thatch or dry cob — a fire loss out of all proportion to the value of the job.
A worker falls through a fragile rooflight on a distribution shed — employers’ liability, RIDDOR reporting and an HSE investigation.
Storm arrives before a re-roof is closed up and water reaches the premises below — contract works for your own work, public liability for the client’s property if you are at fault.
A temporary repair carried out at speed after a storm fails, and the client says you made it worse — a claim that turns entirely on what was recorded at the time.
Materials or tools fall from a scaffold in a busy town-centre street — public liability.
A van left overnight at a rural job is broken into and stripped — tools cover, subject to overnight storage and security conditions.
It can be, but it has to be declared. Proximity to thatch or cob transforms the fire exposure, and some wordings restrict hot works within a set distance of combustible construction. Raised up front it is usually workable; discovered at claim stage it becomes a coverage dispute.
It affects how a submission should be presented. Emergency work in poor conditions on unsurveyed roofs is higher risk, and it produces more disputes about what was made good. Underwriters take it better when it is described honestly alongside your method for temporary repairs and what you record before leaving site.
Fragile rooflights and corroded sheeting, without much doubt. Falls through fragile surfaces are one of the main causes of serious roofing injury, and covers, staging and a firm rule against walking a sheet roof unprotected are the first things both underwriters and inspectors ask about.
That is what it is for — your own work in progress against storm and water damage before hand-over. It will look at how the roof was secured, so overnight sheeting, fixings and a record of how the job was left matter to the outcome.
Work at height and hot works together produce the severe claims most mainstream insurers would rather not see, so many decline on the trade code alone. That is a market-access problem, and it is what a specialist broker is for.
Generally yes. Labour-only sub-contractors working under your direction with your equipment count as employees for compulsory insurance; only genuinely independent firms working to their own methods sit outside it.
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.
