Reviewed by Matthew Bartlett, Director · Last reviewed 8 July 2026
Engineering consultancies renew PI cover into a market that has been reshaped by the Building Safety Act 2022 and by successive project failures that have concentrated underwriters' minds on structural, fire and geotechnical exposures. The Engineering Council's framework and the discipline institutions — ICE, IStructE, IMechE, IET, ICE Chartered, CIBSE — each set expectations for adequate PI cover, but the definition of adequate is left to the practice and its regulator. Renewal is when the practice's discipline mix, its live projects and its historical liability tail are re-tested against insurer appetite.
Ten to twelve weeks before renewal is the sensible position for any consultancy with structural, façade, fire-engineering, or geotechnical work on the record. Eight weeks is workable for a smaller mechanical or building-services practice with a clean record. The reason for the earlier start is the way engineering PI capacity has consolidated. Insurers writing meaningful engineering risk manage their appetite tightly by discipline, project type and geography, and the submission that arrives late tends to reach the shortest list of markets willing to consider it.
Under section 3 of the Insurance Act 2015 the practice owes a duty of fair presentation. The proposal will ask for a fee-income split by discipline — civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, fire, geotechnical, building services, transportation, environmental — because each carries a distinct claim profile. It will ask for a project list covering the largest and highest-risk jobs by value, contract type and appointment terms. Claims and notified circumstances go in for five years or longer. Collateral warranty exposures should be listed with the beneficiary types — funders, purchasers, tenants — and any duty-of-care deed or step-in provisions flagged. Discipline changes since the last renewal — a firm that has taken on structural work for the first time, or added fire engineering, or expanded into geotechnical — are material.
Collateral warranties are the single most commonly under-disclosed exposure at engineering PI renewal. A practice that signed twenty warranties in the year without flagging them at renewal is presenting an incomplete picture. Section 135 of the Building Safety Act 2022 extended the Defective Premises Act limitation period retrospectively to 30 years for dwellings completed before 28 June 2022 and prospectively to 15 years, which changes the residential structural liability tail materially. Discipline-mix change is a material fact under the Insurance Act 2015; adding a discipline mid-year without notifying is exactly the kind of omission that gets tested in a claim. Net-contribution clauses in appointments protect against joint-and-several exposure but insurers view them differently by risk profile. Cladding, fire-compartmentation and structural-safety review work carries the market's tightest scrutiny. Run-off cover after cessation should be planned around the long-tail residential-work exposure, not around the six-year contractual limitation period.
95% of Apex clients renew with Apex. The retention comes from a process rather than from any promise about outcome. Engineering practices whose broker treats renewal as re-underwriting — reading the collateral warranty schedule, understanding the discipline changes, disclosing the BSA-adjacent exposures honestly — get outcomes that match the risk. Practices whose broker submits last year's proposal with the numbers rolled forward do not. The 95% describes the difference over time.
Limit adequacy for an engineering consultancy is easier to talk about than to get right. Individual project appointments increasingly require named limits at £5m, £10m or more, and collateral warranties given to funders and purchasers can carry their own limit provisions. A consultancy that has taken on a single project with a £10m limit requirement while the underlying PI policy still sits at £2m has a mismatch that will emerge on the next claim. The right limit review at renewal considers the highest appointment-mandated limit across the current book, the aggregate cover position for a consultancy where multiple appointments could give rise to related claims, the BSA long-tail on the historical residential exposure, and the run-off implications for principals nearing retirement. Aggregate limits behave differently from any-one-claim limits under linked-claim scenarios; the difference matters.
One named broker owns the account. The submission is drafted with the practice, distinguishing fee income by discipline in the categories insurers use, and the project list is prepared with the technical directors rather than around them. Collateral warranty exposure is flagged and quantified. Every insurer with genuine engineering appetite on our panel is approached where it makes sense, including insurers who write structural and fire-engineering risk and those who exclude it. Wording differences — BSA-adjacent exclusions, cladding exclusions, defence-costs treatment, retroactive dates, net-contribution tr