Postby SW18_Dad » Mon Mar 13, 2023 7:57 am
What is most shocking is that the ‘professionals’ involved won’t have bothered checking if the ‘basement company’ had any *relevant* insurance cover.
Basement insurance cover is totally different to general build insurance. General build cover goes down 1.2m for standard foundations and drains.
Basement insurance will generally go down to 7-10m for non project specific covers.
It is also impossible to get basement insurance for new entrants to the market: because of issues like this.
There are a lot of ‘basement companies’ offering Design and Build contracts. Only problem is they don’t have any Professional Indemnity cover (for the design bit because they can’t get it) and rely on the fairy story that the architects and engineers have it so that is OK.
It isn’t OK - they are simply working with no insurance cover.
Yup, I own a basement company and I get quite fed up with paying £6k month for insurance covers, which pushes the prices of the jobs up, and being undercut by others, who don’t have cover, because they ‘did a great job on my mate’s house’.
Not all basements are equal in complexity. Some are very technically demanding to do.
So you get some companies that do a few simple basements and build up a ‘reputation’ for doing basements. Then they get over confident and do something too complex…
Ummmm but this basement is quite complicated……they know what they are doing….really?…….they did a great job for XYZ……walk away.