Do You Need Product Liability Insurance? What Is Product Liability Insurance? How Much Product Liability Insurance Do You Need To Protect Yourself And Business?
What Is Product Liability Insurance?
Product Liability Insurance protects you or your company if a product that you sold to a customer causes them physical harm.
It protects you if someone suffers from physical harm or damage to their property as a result of a product that you have supplied (even if you have not manufactured it) against a claim for personal injury compensation (which can ammount to millions), legal fees and other associated costs and expenses caused by the defective product.
How Much Cover Should Your Product Liability Insurance Provide?
A claim for compensation will vary in size depending on the injury or harm caused by your product.
Whilst some claims can be small in amount, others, if causing substantial personal injury, or damage to property, can run into the millions.
You should ensure that you have sufficient product liability insurance cover to fully compensate anyone who makes a claim against you.
Whilst £1 million used to be considered sufficient, often now product liability insurance will cover you for £2 million, £5 million or £10 million.
Ultimately, you should obtain as much cover as you can, to ensure that should a product ever cause injury or damage, the insurance will easily cover the compensation or costs, otherwise you or your business may have to pay any shortfall above your product liability insurance cover amount.
Design, Production or Supply of Products
Whether you design your own products, manufacture products for someone else or supply products to the end user, you should ensure that you have adequate product liability insurance.
This can apply whether you import from outside of your country or buy and sell other people’s products in the UK.
How To Obtain Product Liability Insurance?
You can purchase product liability insurance in the same ways that you would buy any other sme insurance product.
You can either go direct to an insurance company, use an insurance broker to obtain some quotations for you, or use an insurance comparison website.
The key thing to check is not only your premium but that you really do have adequate product liability insurance cover to cover all costs and compensation claims against you.
Whilst saving a few pounds on your product liability insurance premium might seem like a good idea at the time, if you are left with a claim for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, because you did not obtain enough insurance cover, that could ruin your business.
Obtain the maximum product liability insurance cover that you can afford to protect your business.