No regulated activity happens here

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) authorises the firms that arrange, recommend or sell insurance: brokers, insurers and other intermediaries who take on a regulated duty toward the person they are placing cover for. This site holds no such authorisation, and it does not need one, because it does not arrange, recommend or sell insurance policies of any kind.

That has practical consequences for what you will and will not find here. There is no quote form, because collecting your details to pass on for a quote is itself a regulated activity. There is no eligibility checker that feeds into an insurer's or broker's application process. There is no ranking of named insurers or brokers, and no answer to 'which policy should I buy', because giving that answer would mean giving regulated advice, which this site does not do.

What the site does instead

What the site does is explain how business insurance actually works, using claims that were decided, disputed or refused, and the statute or judgment that decided them. A claim story sets out what happened, what the policy wording said, and what a court, an ombudsman or an insurer's own decision established about that wording. The guides and claims library work the same way: citing the source, naming the rule, and leaving the decision about your own cover to you and whoever you choose to arrange it with.

Checking who is authorised to sell you cover

Before you deal with any broker or insurer, you can check whether they are authorised on the FCA Register, the public record of every firm and individual the FCA has approved and what they are permitted to do. If you need to find an authorised broker and do not already have one, the British Insurance Brokers' Association (BIBA) runs a find-a-broker service for that purpose. Neither of those is something this site provides directly; both are named destinations you go to instead.

Where a complaint about a policy or a claim goes

If you have a dispute with an insurer or broker, it does not come here. The first step is the firm's own complaints process, which every FCA-authorised firm is required to run. If that does not resolve it, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) can look at complaints from businesses, but only where the business qualifies as an 'eligible complainant'. The threshold, in place since 2019 and worth checking against the current FOS eligibility criteria before you rely on it, sets the limits at annual turnover below £6.5 million and fewer than 50 employees, or a balance sheet total below £5 million. A business above those thresholds needs to pursue a dispute through the courts or through its own contract, not through the FOS.

Nothing on this site is a substitute for that process, and nothing here changes what your own policy says. For background on how a policy dispute typically unfolds before it reaches that stage, the underwriter's view of how a policy gets priced and the about page set out what this publication is for.

Every legal position, case story and figure on this site points to a named source: a statute on legislation.gov.uk, a judgment on BAILII, a decision summary published by the Financial Ombudsman Service, a register entry on the FCA's own website, or guidance from BIBA or the ABI. Naming the source lets you check it.

Why figures carry a date

Thresholds move. The turnover figure that decides whether a business counts as an eligible complainant for the Financial Ombudsman Service has changed before and will change again. The minimum limit under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 is a floor set by statute, but the amount most policies are actually written at is a market practice, not a legal fixture, and that practice shifts. Any figure on this site is stated as it stood at the point the page was published, and marked as such. A figure without a date attached is not a figure worth trusting, on this site or anywhere else, so if you see one that looks undated, treat it as unverified.

What a citation actually points to

A citation to a statute names the Act and, where it matters, the section: for instance, Insurance Act 2015, s.3 for the duty of fair presentation. A citation to a case names the parties and the neutral citation, such as FCA v Arch Insurance (UK) Ltd and others [2021] UKSC 1, so it can be found on BAILII independently of anything written about it here. A citation to a regulator names the specific decision or register page.

If a link no longer works

Statute pages get renumbered, judgments get re-hosted, and regulators redesign their sites. If a link on this site no longer resolves, the source has not stopped existing, only moved. The statute can be found by searching its short title and year directly on legislation.gov.uk. A case can be found by searching the neutral citation on BAILII. A regulator's position can be checked by going to that regulator's own current site, for example the glossary where terms are cross-referenced. Guides that build on cited figures, such as those in the guides section, work the same way: the citation is a starting point for your own check, not a substitute for it.