Playbook, electrical contractor
The two questions hiding inside are you insured
Customers ask electricians whether they are insured because somebody told them to ask, and they are usually not sure what a satisfactory answer would sound like. Underneath it there are two separate questions, and the second one, about the certificate that ends up in a conveyancing file, is the one with actual consequences.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for insurance and coverage holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The question splits: whether you carry liability cover if something goes wrong on the day, and whether the work will be certified and notified so it stands up when the property is sold or let.
- The second half carries legal weight, because in many countries certain domestic electrical work has to be carried out or signed off by somebody registered, and notified to the building control authority.
- The customer usually meets that rule at the worst possible moment, when a solicitor or a letting agent asks for paperwork years after the work, so the useful answer is about a document rather than about a policy.
- The regimes differ by country and sometimes within one, so every statement has to be scoped to where you actually work rather than offered as a universal fact.
How it arrives
- are you insured
- are you registered with a scheme
- will i get a certificate for the work
- does this get notified to building control
- my solicitor is asking for an electrical certificate
- how much public liability cover do you carry
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your scheme registration and how a customer verifies it | The scheme, your membership, and the fact that it can be checked on the scheme's own register. Inviting somebody to check independently is worth more than any claim you make about yourself. |
|---|---|
| Your liability cover as published | The figure, and what the policy is for. Published rather than quoted on request, because the customers who care about it are comparing you on it before they call. |
| Which of your jobs are notifiable where you work, and who notifies them | Scoped explicitly to the countries or regions you operate in. A general statement about notification is wrong somewhere, and the somewhere is usually the customer reading it. |
| What document the customer receives, and when | The name of the certificate, what it says, when it arrives, and what to do with it. This is the answer to the solicitor question, three years early. |
The reply
We hold the scheme registration and public liability cover set out on our about page, and the registration can be checked on the scheme's own register rather than taken from us. The part most people are really asking about is the paperwork: certain work in a home has to be notified where we operate, we handle that notification, and the certificate follows afterwards. Keep it somewhere safe, because it is what a solicitor or a letting agent will ask for later.
It disposes of the insurance half in one sentence, including an invitation to verify it independently, then moves to the half that matters to the customer three years from now. Telling somebody to keep the certificate is the small practical line that reads as a firm which has been through a house sale before.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any request for a copy of a certificate for past work, any question about whether existing work in a property was properly certified, and any request for evidence of cover for a specific job.
Certificates for work already done are in the office records rather than here. Leave your name, the address and roughly when the work was done and we will find it and send it over.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- That work carried out by somebody else was properly certified.
- That a certificate can be issued for work you did not do or inspect.
- A cover amount or a registration number that is not published.
- That a job is notifiable in a place you do not work.
Questions
- Is a general statement about notification safe to index?
- Only if it is scoped. Write it as what applies where you work, in the words of the regime that applies there. An unscoped sentence about notification will be quoted to somebody in a different jurisdiction, in your name, and it will be wrong.
- Should we publish the liability figure?
- Landlords and letting agents compare on it and some contracts require a minimum. Publishing it removes an exchange of emails and occasionally wins the job outright. It is also one of the few numbers on an electrical site that never needs a caveat.
- Can it look up a certificate from a past job?
- No, and this is the clean case for the handover. It has no view of your job records, so it explains what the document is and takes the address and the approximate date, which is exactly what the office needs to find the file.
Keep reading
- Everything for a electrical contractorCall out charges, EV charger enquiries and landlord certificates are answerable. A described electrical fault is an escalation, not a question.
- Handling insurance and coverage in generalWhether something is covered turns on the policy wording, so the assistant explains process and never adjudicates. Claims have to reach a person fast.
- The reply that has to get shorter as the danger gets worseOne electrical message makes a careful, balanced answer the wrong answer. It needs four instructions and a phone number.
- The slot is the easy half, the power off window is the appointmentThe date is the easy part. The real agreement is how many hours the house has no supply, and who has to be in while it does not.
- Half the after hours messages are not the electrician's to answerA dark house at midnight is often the street, the meter or the supplier rather than a fault in the building, and saying so saves a call out.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.