Public liability insurance

Public liability insurance covers what your business may become liable for if its work injures somebody or damages their property. The trades under Home care, and the Security and Safety categories, ask for at least £2 million of public liability cover before a service in them can go live.

Send the certificate of insurance or the policy schedule your insurer issues, showing the name of the insured business, the limit of indemnity, the business or trade the policy covers and the date the cover ends. A quotation, a statement of fact or a renewal invitation is not evidence of cover in force, so it does not satisfy this on its own. If the policy is held in a trading name, make sure the name on it matches the business you are listing, or tell us in the same place why it differs.

Cover is arranged with an insurer or through a broker of your own choosing. GoSavis does not sell insurance, does not act as a broker and takes no part in arranging your policy. Many trade bodies and trade associations point their members at schemes, and your accountant or broker can advise on the level of cover that suits the work you do.

Some categories ask for more than public liability alone; where that is so, the requirement is named on the Verification page for your categories. The £2 million figure is the minimum those categories state, not advice on what your business needs.

Send it under Verification in GoSavis Business, where the certificates your categories ask for are listed with the state of each. Attach a PDF, JPG, PNG or WEBP file of up to 8 MB, and give the renewal date printed on the certificate before you attach it, because that is the date GoSavis holds you to. You can send a certificate before you have written a single service, so a business being set up can be checked while it works on the rest.

GoSavis checks the certificate itself before a service in a gated category goes live. While it is with us, the Verification page shows it as being checked, you can carry on writing the service and keep it as a draft, and we email you when there is an update. If we cannot approve what you send, we say why on the same page and you can send a corrected certificate from there.

GoSavis records the renewal date you give and counts the certificate as in force up to and including that day. We tell you about a month before it runs out, again about a week before, and once more the day after it has, each time in GoSavis Business and by email. Once it has run out, it no longer satisfies the requirement and a service in that category cannot be published until a current certificate has been checked. Send the new one from the same page and choose Send a renewal; a service that is already live is not taken down by the date alone.

GoSavis does not arrange, endorse or advise on any of these, and holding one is not a recommendation by us. What we do is check that the business trading on GoSavis in a category that requires one holds it, and that it is still in force.