Ashburnham Insurance Services Ltd

From landscaping and garden design to grass cutting and lawn services, gardening can be a rewarding profession but not one that comes without risks.

Employers’ Liability Insurance is a legal requirement for any gardener who employs someone to work for them. This includes all full-time, part-time, temporary, apprentices and, much to the surprise of many, self-employed labour-only subcontractors. If you’re hiring someone to cut grass or fell trees on a landscaping project, and they are working from your instruction using your tools, you will need employers’ liability cover to financially compensate your workers should they suffer an injury or illness caused by working for you. However, if they are a bonafide subcontractor, they should have their own insurance in place, be using their own tools and be working from their own direction or alongside you rather than under you.

Public Liability Insurance for Gardeners could potentially save your business from financial disaster. It is considered an essential form of protection for gardening businesses. With the tools involved in gardening and landscaping, incidents are always a possibility. Liability insurance will give you the comfort of knowing that should something occur, you won’t be left financially vulnerable. It covers you when a client or a member of the public’s personal property becomes damaged during your work, or if a client or a member of the public becomes injured as a result of your work. For instance, you may accidentally damage an expensive garden ornament, furniture or statue whilst working on a client’s garden and they demand compensation for the damage caused. Other accidents may include hitting a supply cable or bursting a pipe while digging around. (Supply cables laid before 1970 were not covered by any depth regulations, so this can be a common occurrence in some areas.) Or perhaps you leave a gardening tool on the ground and someone trips over it or injures themselves on a sharp edge of the tool. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), approximately 8,700 Britons suffer an injury each year as a direct result of gardening. This includes accidents for which the injured party is not responsible, such as tripping over improperly laid surfacing which they had hired a professional for.

Contract Works Cover is helpful for ensuring that you are protected if something were to go wrong before your contract is completed. If there were a storm or a fire, for example, while no one was working on the grounds, causing damage to the work in progress, the project would be delayed and you would lose out on money from other projects. As no one is at fault, your client isn’t going to be happy about being charged for the extra time, and you wouldn’t want to do all the work again and pay for the damages out of your own pocket.

Tools Cover is something that any professional gardener must consider when shopping for insurance. As a gardener, tools are essential to the operation of their business, the loss or damage of these tools would be detrimental. If your tools were to be stolen or damaged in any way, the costs of replacement could be high and you would lose money for the duration of business inactivity whilst you are waiting for your replacement tools.

Contact us for a quote, and we can tailor an affordable insurance package to suit your specific business based on the services you provide.