Goods in transit insurance for man and van firms

Goods in transit pays to repair or replace your customer’s belongings while they are in your care, in the back of the van, and, if the wording says so, while you are carrying them in and out. That last bit is not a given, and it is where most of the breakages happen. Check it says so in writing.

It is sold with a limit per van load, not per job. Ten grand, fifteen, twenty-five are the usual rungs. Underneath that there is almost always a separate single-item cap, and that is the one that catches people: a £25,000 load limit with a £1,000 single-item cap does not cover her £4,000 piano, whatever the big number on the front says.

What it is not: it is not cover for your van, it is not cover for your own tools and straps, and it is not cover for the damage you do to the house on the way out. Those are three other things, and the house one is coming up in a minute.

Honest bit: nearly everybody picks a load limit that is too low, because a van looks like less than it is. One 2-bed’s worth of furniture, a telly, a couple of laptops and the contents of a wardrobe goes past ten grand quicker than you would think. Price the van you turn up in, not the boxes you can picture.

An ordinary van policy is written for personal use or carriage of own goods: your ladders, your tools, your stock. The moment you are moving somebody else’s furniture and they are paying you for it, you are carrying goods for hire and reward, and that is a different policy at a different price.

Here is why it matters more than anything else on this page. Have a shunt on the A2 with her front room in the back and an own-goods policy behind you, and it does not just cost you the load. The motor claim can be turned down, the goods in transit insurer can decline as well (some goods in transit policies require it, so check the wording) and you are in the frame for driving without proper insurance on top of a van you now have to replace.

It costs more, and that is precisely why it gets quietly skipped. A one-van operator on hire and reward is often paying roughly £1,450 to £2,150 a year for a driver over 35 with a clean record, and more for younger drivers, going by the published courier figures in the hire and reward guide. That gap is the reason, and it is not a good enough one.

Honest bit: this is the one that ends firms. Everything else on this page costs you money when it goes wrong. This one can cost you the van, the job and your licence in the same afternoon.

Public liability covers the damage you do to everything that is not the customer’s belongings: the banister, the scratched oak floor, the gatepost, the neighbour’s wing mirror, and the person you catch with the corner of a wardrobe. It is normally sold at £1m, £2m or £5m. For house moves £1m or £2m is the usual pick; office jobs, letting agents and anything council-run routinely insist on £5m before they will let you through the door.

Employers’ liability is the one people fall over. It is a legal requirement the moment somebody works for you, and “my mate gives me a hand on Saturdays for fifty quid” counts far more often than people assume. It is about the working relationship, not what you call it or whether there is a contract. The legal minimum is £5m and the fines for not having it are eye-watering.

Line them up and it is simple enough. Goods in transit covers their stuff. Public liability covers their house and the people in it. Employers’ liability covers the bloke helping you carry. Miss one and there is a hole exactly the shape of the thing that will eventually happen.

If you are only a few weeks in and working out what else needs sorting, the starting-out guide has the rest of the list: the van, the kit and what to charge.

The box has the rough shape of it. Treat those as a starting point and nothing more. A 24-year-old in a city postcode with a claim behind him and a 45-year-old in a market town with ten clean years are not in the same conversation, and neither is a firm carrying antiques against one shifting student flats.

The honest way to read that list is that one line is most of the bill. Hire and reward van cover is the expensive part and the non-negotiable part. The three covers underneath it (the goods, the house, the helper) often come to less between them than the van does on its own.

Now do it against a job rather than against nothing. Say the lot lands at £1,800 a year. That is £150 a month: about one local sofa job a month, or four or five local 2-bed moves across the year. One dropped telly you have to make good out of your own pocket, and you have spent more than the year’s premium on a Tuesday. What a week actually pays has the job prices behind that sum.

And get three quotes, properly. Premiums for the same van and the same driver come back with hundreds of pounds between them, and the cheapest one is not automatically the wrong answer, but it is worth knowing which cover it quietly left out to get there.

A policy is not the quote summary. The quote summary is marketing. The wording is the thing that decides whether you get paid, and it is worth the twenty minutes it takes to read the exclusions before you have a reason to.

The six in the box are the ones that actually come up. Loading and unloading is first for a reason. A chunk of policies cover goods strictly in transit, meaning while the vehicle is in motion, and almost nothing gets broken while the vehicle is in motion. Things get broken on stairs.

The overnight one bites people who load the night before a long run. If the wording wants the van in a locked compound or fitted with a working alarm and immobiliser, and yours is on the road outside your mum’s, you are not covered for the one night it matters. Same with keys left in for two minutes while you nip back for the last box.

And “packed by the owner” is worth knowing before the conversation, not during it. If she boxed the kitchen herself and the box of glasses arrives as a bag of glass, plenty of policies will not pay, the argument being nobody knows how it was packed. It is not a stitch-up, but it is a thing you should be saying up front rather than afterwards.

Use a broker who knows removals rather than a price-comparison box. Not because comparison sites are a con, but because the questions that decide whether a claim gets paid (loading and unloading, single-item caps, overnight security) are the ones those forms never ask. A broker who places removals cover all day will ask them without being prompted.

Ask for the policy wording before you pay, not the summary. If it does not turn up, that is your answer. Then check the six lines from the section above against it, and get the answers in an email rather than over the phone, so there is something to point at later.

Tell them the truth about what you carry. Declaring pianos, antiques or the odd bit of high-value kit costs a bit more up front and costs you the entire claim if you do not. Same with how many hours you drive and whether anyone else ever takes the wheel.

One more, and it is boring: put renewal in your calendar for eleven months’ time, not twelve. Auto-renewal quotes are consistently worse than new-customer ones, and the fifteen minutes it takes to move is the best-paid quarter hour of your year. None of the above is financial advice. It is what to ask. The broker and the wording are the ones who decide.

Every insurer gives you a certificate. Get the PDFs onto your phone the day they arrive, in something you can find while standing in a hallway, not buried in an email from March. Being able to send proof inside a minute is the difference between getting the office move and getting told they went with someone else.

It matters more the bigger the job. Letting agents, offices and anything with a facilities manager will ask for the certificate and the liability limit before they will book, and a fair few want to see £5m. Firms that can produce it on the spot get asked back.

Be careful what you claim in the meantime. “Fully insured” on your Facebook page while you are running on an own-goods van policy is the sort of line that surfaces at exactly the wrong moment, and it does you no favours with a customer who later works out what it meant. Say what you actually hold: goods in transit to £15,000, public liability to £2m. Specific sounds more like a proper firm than “fully insured” ever did anyway.

Then get it in front of the customer in writing rather than leaving it in a drawer. Whatever you send prices with (a Word template, a text message, or Kwotly) the quote is the natural place for the two lines that say what you carry and what your limits are, because it is the one thing they definitely read.

It will, eventually, and how you handle the first twenty minutes decides most of what follows. Photograph the damage where it happened, before anything moves, the item, the mark on it, the doorway or the stairs it happened on. Do it in front of them. It reads as honest, because it is.

Tell the customer straight away, and do not promise a payout on the doorstep. “That is on me, I am covered for it, I will get it reported today and come back to you” is the whole speech. Committing to a figure before the insurer has seen it is how people end up paying twice.

Then report it fast. Notification windows are shorter than people expect (often days, sometimes strictly worded) and a late notification is a genuinely common reason for a claim being refused when nothing else about it was wrong.

What helps enormously here is having what you agreed in writing: what was on the list, what you quoted, what was included. If it is all in WhatsApp and memory, you are arguing about a wardrobe with somebody who is upset. A quote that lists the items and the price is a record; that is half of what decent quoting kit is for, Kwotly included.

Last one, and it is the sum people forget: work out whether to claim at all. With a £250 or £500 excess and a premium that jumps at renewal, paying £180 for a replacement lamp yourself is often the cheaper end of the deal. Claim the big ones. Absorb the small ones. Know which is which before you are stood in the hallway deciding.