Who insures the works, and until when
A fire two days after practical completion and a fire two days before are the same fire with entirely different consequences.
QScope Team · 30 January 2026 · 4 min read
Contractors all risks insurance covers physical loss or damage to the works while they are being built. Fire, flood, storm, theft, impact, collapse. It is one of the standard insurance obligations in every construction contract and the JCT forms set out who takes it in the contract particulars.
Three options, chosen at contract stage
The JCT forms offer alternatives. Broadly: the contractor insures new works in joint names; the employer insures new works in joint names; or the employer insures existing structures and works in or extensions to them.
The third is the one that causes difficulty, because refurbishment and extension work sits inside a building the employer already owns and already insures. Splitting cover between an existing structure policy and a works policy creates a seam, and damage that crosses the seam produces an argument about which policy responds.
Risk passes at practical completion
Under the JCT forms the contractor’s obligation to insure the works ends at practical completion, and risk passes to the employer. That is one of the five things the certificate does.
The practical consequence is that the employer’s own buildings insurance needs to be in place from that date, not from the date somebody gets round to arranging it. A gap of a fortnight between the contractor’s policy ending and the employer’s starting is a fortnight in which a fire is nobody’s cover.
Partial possession complicates it
Where the employer takes possession of part of the works early, risk in that part passes on the date of possession while the rest stays with the contractor. Both policies then have to reflect the split, and the insurers on both sides have to be told.
Telling them is not optional. A material change not notified is the standard reason a policy does not respond when it is needed.
The excess is the contractor’s problem, until it is not
Policy excesses on construction all risks can be substantial. A claim below the excess is not a claim at all, and the cost of making good the damage falls where the contract puts it, which is usually on the contractor as part of its obligation to complete the works.
What a surveyor should check
- Which option is selected in the contract particulars, and does the policy actually match it?
- Is it in joint names?
- Does the sum insured cover the contract sum plus instructed variations, or the original sum only?
- Does it run to practical completion, or to a fixed date that the job has now passed?
All four are answered by reading the policy schedule once at contract stage. None of them are answerable in the week after a fire.
QScope records the policy, the insured party and the expiry date alongside the practical completion date that ends the obligation.