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

General liability responds to the same thing: 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. Our public liability insurance page sets out what the cover includes and excludes.

Inside a business pack, liability is one section of a bundled product. The packaged products in this market list thousands of occupations, but acceptance still depends on fitting one of the boxes. Where you fit, the premium comes in minutes, and for most small businesses that is the right design.

A standalone general liability policy works the other way round. Your broker writes your business up in a document the trade calls a quote slip. A liability underwriter asks questions before pricing it.

That difference shows up every renewal. A packaged premium moves when the rating table moves, and the table is set for businesses like yours, not yours. A hand-underwritten premium moves when an underwriter's view of your business moves. That premium is not automatically cheaper, but you can influence it, because the underwriter prices your presentation, not your occupation code.

A business starts small in a pack, where the liability section is cheap. Once it grows, works at height, takes on a process the rating table does not like, or adds a second site, the liability premium increases. Nobody flags the point where the pack stops being the right fit for the risk.

The packaged market runs out of appetite before your business runs out of growth, and the market that does want the risk does not sell to the public at all.

The cost of that gap is not usually a declined claim but years of paying a packaged premium for a risk that stopped being a packaged one, or turning down work your cover will not stretch to.

Our guide, why you cannot buy general liability insurance online, explains why a market this large has no front door, what a quote slip holds, and what an underwriting agency is.

What we do when your risk belongs in that market. We write the presentation ourselves rather than forwarding a form. The presentation carries your operations in your own words, your real turnover, your full claims history, including the ones you would rather not mention, and the detail that shows your business is better run than its occupation code suggests. We take it to the liability underwriters whose appetite matches what you do, and we answer their questions.

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: an excavation depth limit, a height limit, a named process carved out. We look for wordings that fit the work rather than endorsements that trim it. Where a restriction genuinely has to apply, we reword it into plain English and put it on your documentation at new business, at every endorsement, and at every renewal.

Occupations with their own specialist market. The clearest sign a packaged product was not built for a class of work is that separate underwriters exist to write it. The Underwriting Agencies Council names demolition, site preparation, and asbestos abatement contractors as a distinct specialist liability class. Abattoirs, poultry processing, and cold storage operations each have their own agencies, as do waste and recycling businesses.

Businesses that have grown past the packaged size. Real turnover, several sites, a serious contractor base, or export exposure don't make a hard risk, just a bigger one than a packaged product was built for.

Businesses watching a packaged liability premium climb. Two or three renewals of steady increases usually means the rating table has moved against your class, not that anything changed at your business. Moving the cover out of the pack may not lower the premium, but it can stop the increases.

Standalone liability generally starts at a higher minimum premium than a business pack's liability section, which is why it is not the answer for a small, simple business.

If you own the building rather than trade from it, your liability is a different product: property owners liability.

"My premium jumped, so I will shop the package around." Shopping around is often worth doing, but moving between packaged products moves you between rating tables that mostly agree about your class of work. If your class 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." Your operations change: a new service line, height work, storing something new, subcontractors where there used to be employees. A business that engages contractors instead of employing people pays no workers compensation for them, so the risk of one 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. On a hand-underwritten policy, the presentation is the foundation. Understating something to keep the premium down puts the response to your largest possible claim in question.

"The renewal was declined, so we must be uninsurable." A decline is one product's appetite, not a verdict on your business. Specialist liability underwriters exist because packaged products have edges. A risk just outside one product's edge is often inside another underwriter's appetite. No broker can promise a market for every risk, but we can present your risk properly to the underwriters who write your kind of work.

"A standalone policy must be broader, or it must be worse." Neither is automatically true: which serves you better depends on what the two wordings say, so we compare both before you buy.

When you have a claim. Make the situation safe and tell us straight away, not the insurer, and we lodge the claim and manage it on your behalf. On a hand-underwritten policy the claim is handled from the presentation made when the policy was placed, so an accurate presentation leaves less to argue about. Our claims page sets out how our claims team works.