On-call rota · key management · emergency repairs
Liability insurance for a breakdown service
A call-out service arrives at the worst possible moment: outside office hours, in an empty building, at an installation that was already broken. That changes who has to prove what in a claim.
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Deze pagina in het Nederlands: Aansprakelijkheidsverzekering voor een storingsdienst.
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A premium indication, not personal advice. Prefer to talk it through? Call 072 - 509 24 56.
In brief
The AVB covers injury and property damage at third parties. At a call-out service that crosses a different risk line twice a day. During the day your work resembles that of any installation and mechanical contracting business. At night three things are added: your engineer works alone, he enters a building he holds the key to and he has to decide on the spot without consulting anyone.
Three cost items lie outside the standard cover. The first is loss of production or rental income because an installation is down: pure financial loss, which points to professional indemnity insurance and, at the client's end, to business interruption insurance. The second is redoing the repair that did not work. The third is the installation you are working on at that moment, which falls under the care, custody and control exclusion.
What you can control is your file. A service ticket with the time, readings, the actions carried out and the advice you gave the client is your most important document in a claim. Report an incident immediately: Article 7:941 of the Dutch Civil Code requires timely notification, and after night work the situation has usually been repaired or cleared away by the next morning.
This page deals with one situation. The full overview is on Compare public and employers' liability insurance (AVB).
What service work outside office hours runs into
Four subjects that cause more argument at a call-out service than the cover itself.
Access with a key, pass or code
If you hold clients' keys and alarm codes, you are a link in their security. If a key is lost, a claim follows for replacing a master key system; if there is a break-in after your engineer failed to set the alarm, a larger one follows. Watch the exclusion for damage caused by theft or misappropriation by your own staff and the question whether holding keys appears as a stated capacity on your policy.
Emergency repairs and the temporary fix
Keeping a client running until the parts arrive is normal service work. It becomes risky when the temporary fix stays in place. Record in writing that it is a temporary measure , what permanent repair is needed and when. If the client refuses that repair and things then go wrong, that is worth having as a defence. Bypassing a safety device to keep production running is not: Article 7:952 of the Dutch Civil Code excludes damage caused by intent and deliberate recklessness.
Working alone at an unfamiliar site
On-call rotas bring a duty of care of their own under Article 7:658 of the Dutch Civil Code. Think of a lone-working arrangement, contact with the control room, rules about working with the power off and a rest regime after a night call-out. An accident in which it emerges that your engineer stood alone in a switch room with no such arrangement is a difficult file for an insurer.
The drive to the fault
Emergency runs in the dark increase the road risk. The van is subject to the compulsory insurance under Article 2 of the Dutch Motor Insurance Liability Act (WAM), but that does not cover the driver himself for his own injury. You arrange that employers' liability in traffic separately through WEGAS or WEGAM, and that also applies where an engineer turns out in his own car.
What does your premium depend on?
- Payroll and number of service engineers — the yardstick for employers' liability
- Share of work outside office hours — night and weekend shifts are assessed separately
- Type of installations — climate control, electrical, refrigeration or production equipment
- Key and access management — the number of buildings whose keys or codes you hold
- Number of service vehicles — determines the size of the road risk
- Sum insured and excess — per claim and per insurance year
Insurers weigh these details differently. That is why comparing pays off.
What is covered
| Situation | AVB | BAV |
|---|---|---|
| After a night repair your engineer leaves a gas connection not gas-tight and a fire starts | Yes | No |
| While changing a pump, water runs through the ceiling into the shop below | Yes | No |
| An on-call worker is injured at a fault in a machine hall he does not know | Yes | No |
| The switch cabinet your engineer is working on at that moment burns out | No | No |
| A client loses a day's production because your service only arrived after twelve hours | No | Yes |
| A wrong diagnosis leads the client to replace a compressor that had nothing wrong with it | No | Yes |
The installation itself is weak in both columns; cover for property being worked on is therefore the first question when you apply.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we are asked most often about this.
The client claims loss of production because the installation was down longer. Is that covered?
In principle, no. Downtime without damaged property is pure financial loss and the AVB is not intended for it. If you damage something during the repair and the installation fails as a result, the consequential loss can run with that property damage. The boundary is therefore not the size of the loss, but whether something was broken.
There has been a break-in at a building we hold a key to. What now?
Report it immediately and cooperate with the investigation. If the client can show that your engineer left the building unlocked or unalarmed, there is a failure and the loss comes into the picture. Theft or misappropriation by your own staff is, however, excluded on virtually every liability policy. Record the issue of keys and have engineers sign off the locking-up round.
The fault came back after two days. Does the insurance pay for the second visit?
No. Doing again or doing better work you should already have delivered is performance under the contract and not damage to a third party. That falls under the exclusion for putting right your own work. If that second fault did damage something, for example a burnt-out motor or water damage, that part is an insured property damage loss.
Our engineer advised over the phone to keep running. That turned out badly.
That concerns the quality of advice and not injury or damage from your actions. A claim arising from it is financial loss and belongs on professional indemnity insurance. Always record advice given by telephone in the service ticket or by email, including the alternative you offered and the choice the client made.
Read more
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