Professional indemnity cover and public liability insurance cover similar types of claims. The difference is how these claims come about. While professional indemnity cover protects your business against claims made by a client for mistakes you make within your work, public liability insurance covers you against claims made by members of the public, that may be unrelated to the job you’re carrying out.
In other words, if damage or injury results from an accident on your property or theirs, owing to your equipment or staff in some way, you’ll need public liability insurance to provide coverage. If the damage, financial loss or injury occurs specifically to a client, due specifically to a mistake you’ve made within your work, or due to an error within the services you provide, then you’ll need professional indemnity insurance to cover the claim.
Public liability claims can arise from damage to property or injuries sustained by a member of the public on your business premises, on the property of a client, or in public. Say a delivery person slips up the stairs on the way into your office building, or a customer’s child trips over your toolbox while you’re at their home. Perhaps you accidentally drop some equipment off the scaffolding you’re working on, which injures a member of the public passing by. These cases would come under public liability, as they’re separate from the work you’re carrying out.
Professional indemnity covers you when you do something wrong, or fail to do something you are supposed to do, which causes a financial, reputational or other loss. In some cases, professional negligence can cause bodily injury, too. This can be the case for an architect who makes a mistake in the plans for a roof. Should the roof collapse and injure a person, this person could make a claim against the architect and demand compensation for their injury. In this case, the incident has come about due to a mistake on the part of the architect. Protection against this claim would, therefore, come under the architect’s professional indemnity insurance.
