When a business pack stops fitting your risk, general liability is the cover you buy on its own.

Quick answerA general liability policy is the same protection as your business pack's liability section, bought as a policy in its own right. The difference is not what it covers, it is how it is priced. A package rates your liability by computer, off a list of occupations. A standalone policy is written up by your broker and priced by hand, by a liability underwriter who actually reads what your business does.

Start with what does not change, because this is where most explanations go wrong. A standalone general liability policy responds to the same thing your packaged liability section responds to: your legal liability when someone outside your business is injured, or their property is damaged, because of something your business did or did not do. What that cover includes, where its edges sit, and what it never pays for are set out in full on our public liability insurance page, and this page does not repeat any of it.

What changes is how the cover is bought, and that turns out to matter far more than owners expect.

Inside a business pack, liability is one section of a bundled product. It is rated by a computer, off an occupation list. Those lists are long, thousands of occupations on the packaged products in this market, and acceptance still depends on your business fitting one of the boxes on the list. Where it fits, you get a price in minutes. That is the whole design of a packaged product, and for most small businesses it is genuinely the right one.

A standalone general liability policy works the other way round. There is no rating table with your occupation already on it. Instead your broker writes up your business, what you actually do all day, where you do it, how big you have become, who works for you and how, and what has gone wrong before, and puts that written presentation in front of a liability underwriter. That person reads it, asks questions, and prices it by hand. In the trade the document is called a quote slip, and it is the oldest mechanism in this industry: a written presentation of one risk, to one underwriter, for one answer.

That difference shows up every renewal. A packaged premium moves when the rating table moves, which is a decision made a long way from your business and about businesses like yours rather than about yours. A hand-underwritten premium moves when an underwriter's view of your business moves. That is not automatically cheaper, and nobody honest will tell you it is. It is a number you can actually do something about, because the thing being priced is the presentation of your business rather than its occupation code.

Quick answerThrough a broker, in writing, and no other way. Nobody in this market sells to the public: standalone liability is written by insurers' own liability underwriters and by specialist underwriting agencies, and all of them distribute through licensed brokers only. There is no consumer quote form, no comparison panel and no direct line. The only way in is a broker presenting your business to an underwriter.

Why a market this large has no front door, how much of Australian liability cover sits behind it, and what an underwriting agency actually is, are explained in full in why you cannot buy general liability insurance online.

What we do when your risk belongs in that market. We write the presentation ourselves rather than forwarding a form. Your operations in your own words, your real turnover, your claims history in full including the ones you would rather not mention, and the detail that explains why your business is better run than its occupation code makes it look. Then we take it to the liability underwriters whose appetite matches what you do, and we answer their questions. A packaged quote asks you to tick a box; a liability underwriter asks why you do it that way, and a good answer is worth more to your premium than any amount of shopping around.

And we read what comes back. Liability cover is often narrowed on the schedule rather than in the quote, by an endorsement written in policy language rather than in yours: an excavation depth limit, a height limit, a named process carved out. Our job is to find wordings that fit the work rather than endorsements that trim it, and where a restriction genuinely has to apply, to reword it into plain English and put it on your documentation at new business, at every endorsement and at every renewal. A restriction on your cover should be something you have read, not something you discover at a claim.

Quick answerThe expensive mistakes here are not about buying the wrong cover. They are about assuming a rising packaged premium is the market's only answer, describing the business the way it used to be, and treating a declined renewal as a verdict rather than one product's appetite running out.

"My premium jumped, so I will shop the package around." Reasonable, and often worth doing. Just know what that exercise can and cannot reach. Moving between packaged products moves you between rating tables that mostly agree with each other about your class of work. If the reason your premium is climbing is that your class of work has moved past what packaged products are built to price, a second packaged quote confirms the problem rather than solving it.

"I will describe the business the way I always have." Trades and activities drift. Businesses add a service line, take on height work, start storing something new, or bring subcontractors in where there used to be employees. That last one matters more than it sounds on a liability policy: a business that engages contractors instead of employing people pays no workers compensation for them, so the risk of one of them being hurt on the job transfers to the liability policy, and what you pay subcontractors is how an underwriter rates it. An out-of-date description is the most common reason a liability premium is wrong, in either direction, and on a hand-underwritten policy it is worse than wrong. The presentation is the policy's foundation, and understating something to keep the number down puts the response to your largest possible claim in question at the exact moment you cannot afford the argument.

"The renewal was declined, so we must be uninsurable." A decline is one product's appetite, not a verdict on your business. The whole reason specialist liability underwriters exist is that packaged products have edges, and a risk sitting just outside one product's edge is often squarely inside another underwriter's appetite. What no broker can honestly promise you is a market for every risk, every time. What we can do is ask properly, of the people who write your kind of work.

"A standalone policy must be broader, or it must be worse." Neither is automatically true, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read both wordings. A packaged liability section is a standard wording applied to thousands of businesses. A standalone policy is written for one. Which of those serves you better depends entirely on what your business does and what the two documents actually say, which is a job for whoever places the cover, done before you buy rather than after something happens.

What all this means when you do have a claim. Make the situation safe first, then tell us straight away rather than the insurer. We lodge the claim and manage it on your behalf from that point. On a hand-underwritten policy that matters more rather than less, because the people handling your claim are working from the presentation that was made when the policy was placed. A claim that starts from an accurate description of your business is one fewer thing for anybody to argue about. How our claims team works, and how to reach them, is set out on our claims page.