Towergate Tradesman Insurance (now Everywhen)

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Trade liability cover here runs to £10,000,000 on public, product and employers' liability alike, with tools insured from £1,000 to £5,000 per person, a £100 standard excess and a single-item cap of £1,500. Those figures come off the provider's own trade pages, read on 21 September 2026. Work at height is quoted to 15 metres and excavation down to 2 metres, and 27 separate trade products are sold, from bricklayers and gas fitters to tree surgeons and scaffolders.

One thing to know before you click, because it decides which website you end up on: Towergate no longer exists as a brand. The Ardonagh Group renamed its advisory business Everywhen in May 2025 and rolled the new name out across offices and websites on 17 November 2025, folding more than 35 broking brands into it. Every old towergateinsurance.co.uk trade address now returns a 302 redirect to the matching page on everywhen.co.uk. The trade desk, the panel and the phone numbers did not move; only the letterhead did.

What sits behind it is large. Everywhen places around £2 billion of gross written premium through its general insurance businesses, £4.8 billion across the wider group, for more than 500,000 customers from over 100 UK locations, running 55 exclusive specialist schemes. The quote line is 0330 173 3617 and claims are taken on 0344 980 8367; premiums can be spread over ten monthly direct debits.

Your client writes the limit; the scheme only writes it down

Nothing in law tells a builder how much public liability to buy. The number lands on the certificate because somebody further up the chain asked for it, and the pre-qualification schemes that gate most commercial work are more interesting for what they leave out than for what they demand.

Build UK's Common Assessment Standard question set, version 5, dated 1 July 2025 devotes five questions to cover: Q28 employers' liability, Q29 public liability, Q30 professional indemnity, Q31 product liability and Q32 contractors' all risks. Each asks for the same four things — “Policy number, Limit, Excess, Expiry date” — and insists the company name on the policy matches the legal name given at Q1. Q29 is the only one that is compulsory for everybody; Q28 falls away if you employ nobody, Q30 if you are neither Principal Designer nor Designer, Q31 if you supply no materials. Not one of the five sets a minimum figure.

Constructionline's Gold and Platinum supplier checklist guide of February 2026 goes further into the paperwork and no further into the money. It wants certificates, the insurer and the broker, the policy number — “we are unable to accept ‘TBC’ or anything else in place of a Policy Number” — the limit of indemnity, the limit for a single event, the excess, the expiry date, and the broker's business name and telephone number. Again there is no minimum. Design work categories trigger professional indemnity; directly employed staff trigger employers' liability; material supply triggers product liability. The schemes are auditing that you told the truth, not that you bought enough.

That is why the quoted ladder matters more than the ceiling. Cover is sold in £1m, £2m, £3m, £5m and £10m steps with higher limits “on request”, and the step you choose should be read off the contract you are bidding for, not off a brochure. A local authority framework and a domestic kitchen refit do not want the same number, and buying the £10m because it is there is as much of a mistake as buying the £1m because it is cheapest.

A trade policy asks more of you than your van policy does

This is the part most tradespeople have never been told, and it is worth more than any cover limit on the page. A sole trader's own car insurance is a consumer contract. The liability policy he buys the same afternoon is not, and the two sit under different statutes with different consequences for getting a question wrong.

A business policy falls under the Insurance Act 2015, which came into force eighteen months after Royal Assent, on 12 August 2016. Section 3 replaces the consumer's simple duty to answer carefully with a duty of fair presentation: before the contract is entered into, the insured must disclose “every material circumstance which the insured knows or ought to know”, or at minimum give “the insurer sufficient information to put a prudent insurer on notice” that it should ask more. It must be done “in a manner which would be reasonably clear and accessible to a prudent insurer”. In plain terms: the questions on the form are the floor, not the ceiling.

Schedule 1 sets out what happens when that duty is breached. Where the breach was deliberate or reckless the insurer may “avoid the contract and refuse all claims” and “need not return any of the premiums paid”. Where it was neither, the outcome depends on what the insurer would have done knowing the truth: if it would not have written the risk at all it may avoid and refuse claims but must hand the premium back; if it would have written it on different terms, the policy is read as though those terms had always applied. And if it would simply have charged more, paragraph 6 applies the arithmetic nobody expects — the insurer “need pay on the claim only X% of what it would otherwise have been under an obligation to pay”, X being the premium actually charged as a percentage of the premium that should have been. Pay 60% of the right premium and a £50,000 claim settles at £30,000, with the policy still perfectly valid.

Two practical consequences when you take the four-minute quote. Declare the turnover, the trades and the height and depth you actually work to, not the ones you mostly work to. And if there is something the questions never reach — a subcontractor arrangement, an unusual client, a past claim on a different policy — say it anyway, in writing, and keep the email.

Seven insurers, one certificate, and no wording until you ask

Everywhen is a broker, not an underwriter. The trade pages name the paper behind the schemes openly, which is more than many brokers do: AXA, Arch, Covéa, Markel, QBE, Zurich and Intact. That is seven, and every one is an established commercial insurer rather than a start-up MGA. On the contractors' all risks product the page names Markel Direct, a trading name of Markel International Insurance Company Limited, specifically.

What the pages do not tell you is which of the seven you will end up with, or on whose wording. There is no policy document, no insurance product information document and no specimen schedule published anywhere on the trade section; you find out what you have bought after you have given your details and taken a quote. That is normal for a scheme broker and it is still a gap, because the clauses that decide a claim — the tools conditions, the contract works exclusions, the height warranty — live in a document you cannot read in advance.

The product range itself is unusually wide. Twenty-seven separate trade products are sold, covering bathroom fitters, bricklayers, builders, builders' merchants, carpenters, carpet cleaners, construction, contractors, electrical contractors, electricians, engineering, gardeners, gas fitters, groundworkers, handymen, hired-in plant, landscapers, painters and decorators, plasterers, plumbers, professional indemnity, roofers, scaffolders, tools, tradesman, and tree surgeons. Contractors' all risks bundles contract works, hired-in plant, own plant and tools against “fire, flood, storm, malicious damage, and theft”, with legal defence costs from £100,000 and named options for scaffolding, hot roofing, underpinning and hazardous locations — the four things that get a small builder declined elsewhere.

What the van has to be doing at two in the morning

Tools cover is where trade policies are won and lost, and the condition attached to it is stated plainly enough to quote: “Overnight theft is excluded from vehicles unless locked in a secure building.” The van itself has to be “fully secured, all doors and windows closed with all locks fully engaged”, and “where alarms are fitted, they must be set”.

Read that against how most of the trade actually lives. A plumber who parks on the road outside his own house, or in an unlit bay at a travel inn between jobs, has no overnight tools cover at all under that clause — not reduced cover, none. A locked garage, a yard with a shut door, a secure compound: those work. The kerb does not.

The money is worth checking too. The range runs £1,000 to £5,000 per person with a single-article limit of £1,500, which is fine for a bag of hand tools and tight for one modern rotary laser or a decent SDS set. The excess is £100 on each claim. Wear and tear, electrical and mechanical breakdown, damage caused while a tool is in use, and anything “not listed or disclosed” are all outside cover — that last one making the schedule of items you supply at quote stage part of the contract rather than a formality.

The cover that has to outlive the job

Professional indemnity is quoted from £1,000,000 to £10,000,000 and it behaves differently from everything else on the page. Liability cover responds to when the accident happened; professional indemnity responds to when the claim is made. Let the policy lapse and the work you did while insured stops being covered, which is why run-off matters and why the pages raise the point that a claim in tort can arrive well after the six-year contractual limitation period has run out.

Any trade doing design as well as installation needs to take this seriously, because the pre-qualification schemes have already noticed. The Common Assessment Standard waives Q30 only if you are neither Principal Designer nor Designer; Constructionline requires professional indemnity from consultants and from “Contractors with Design work categories”. Specify the boiler as well as fit it, size the steel as well as install it, and you have crossed that line whether or not anyone called it design at the time.

One practical note on the contractors' all risks side: faulty workmanship, wear and tear, design errors, and damage occurring before the policy starts or after the project completes are all excluded. The first and third of those are the gap professional indemnity is meant to fill, so on a design-and-build job the two products are not alternatives — each is the other's hole.

The company that has been through three names

The entity you contract with is Advisory Insurance Brokers Limited, company 04043759, FCA firm reference 313250, registered at 2 Minster Court, Mincing Lane, London EC3R 7PD. Companies House records the history: incorporated on 31 July 2000 as Broomco (2274) Limited, renamed MIA General Insurance Service Managers Limited on 19 September 2000, then Towergate Underwriting Group Limited on 31 December 2003, and finally Advisory Insurance Brokers Limited on 22 March 2022. The Everywhen brand arrived on top of that in 2025; the legal person behind your certificate has not changed since the Towergate years.

Its parent is one of the largest brokers in the world. The Ardonagh Group's full-year 2025 results report pro forma income of $2.9 billion and pro forma adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion, income growth of 20.4%, EBITDA growth of 24.8%, a margin of 35.7% and organic income growth of 4%, across more than 12,000 staff in 250-plus locations in over 30 countries, after 95 acquisitions in the year of which 93 were outside the UK. Chief executive David Ross put it this way: “In the eight years since Ardonagh launched we've seen income grow ten-fold positioning us as a top 15 global insurance broker.”

If something goes wrong, the published timetable is specific. Staff aim to resolve a complaint within three business days; if more investigation is needed you should hear within five business days, again at four weeks with the reason for the delay, and a final response by eight weeks. After that, or if the answer does not satisfy you, the Financial Ombudsman Service at Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR will take it — but you must go to them within six months of the final response letter. Policies written at Lloyd's route through Lloyd's own complaints team first.

Note the small-business gate on that last route. The Ombudsman only takes a business complaint where annual turnover is under £6.5 million and either the balance sheet total is under £5 million or there are fewer than 50 employees. Most readers of a tradesman page clear that comfortably; a growing contractor should check before assuming the backstop is there.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 21 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.