FCA authorised · FRN 7249520117 325 0027Quote & buy →
Yate is a roofing market defined by one building boom. The town was expanded from a village into a planned new town from the 1960s, and the estates that came with it went up over a relatively short period. Fifty-odd years later those roofs are all arriving at the same point at the same time.
That produces a very particular workload. Concrete interlocking tiles reaching the end of their service life, with nail fatigue, delamination and bedding failure turning up street by street. Low roof pitches that limit what you are allowed to re-cover with. And the flat-roofed garages, porches, dormers and rear extensions of the same era, where the original felt has long since gone brittle.
The exposure that follows is not exotic. It is whole-roof strips on occupied family homes, on tight estate roads, with cars on the drive and no obvious place to put a skip or a scaffold. Apex arranges cover that reflects that pattern of work, placed by a named broker who will present the risk properly.
Yate’s housing was built over a short period, and its roofs are failing on the same timetable. That concentrates a roofer’s work — and the risk — in a narrow set of situations.
The most common technical trap on this stock is the minimum pitch. Every covering has one, and a good deal of the housing here sits close to or below the limit for the materials people would like to use. If a homeowner asks for a covering their roof cannot take and you fit it, the resulting driven-rain ingress is not a workmanship defect — it is a specification failure, and the argument runs to professional indemnity rather than public liability. Recording what you recommended, and what the customer chose, is worth doing in writing every time.
A full re-cover means the house is open, the family is still living in it, and everything you remove has to come down past their windows, their car and often their conservatory. Falling material, damage to gutters and rendering, and rain getting in before the temporary covering is properly fixed are the everyday claims. On narrow estate roads there is frequently nowhere to site a skip or a scaffold that is not somebody’s parking space, which is its own source of disputes.
Because working at height and hot works together fall outside many insurers’ appetite, and a lot of them decline the trade as a class rather than look at the individual firm. Presentation is what changes it: how access and edge protection are handled, how much torch work you do, and how you manage whole-roof strips on occupied houses.
Typically yes, subject to conditions — usually a hot-works permit and a fire-watch period after you finish. On this stock the hot work is mostly on flat-roofed garages, dormers and extensions, where there is timber immediately underneath and the smoulder is not visible from the roof.
On larger contracts you may carry contractor or principal-contractor duties. Most estate re-roofing is domestic, where the duties fall differently, but as soon as you are working for a housing association, a developer or a commercial client the position changes and your cover should reflect it.
Tools and plant can be covered against theft from site, van or compound, with hired-in access plant added where needed. On residential streets there is rarely a secure compound, which is exactly what the overnight security conditions in the wording address.
Yes — it is legally required if you employ anyone, including labour-only sub-contractors working under your control. Roofing runs on labour-only crews and the requirement is frequently misunderstood.
Two things. First, that it picks up specification and design as well as installation, because on low-pitch re-covers the choice of covering is a judgement you are being paid for. Second, that the contract works section is real, because a whole-roof strip on an occupied house leaves the building open and the weather does not negotiate. Both are commonly thin in a cheap trades policy.
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.
