Planned Cover is a full-service insurance broker that caters to professionals in the built environment, offering a wide range of general insurance services and risk management solutions for both professional practices and personal lives. Over the course of its 50-year existence, the company has transitioned from exclusively matching architects with suitable professional indemnity insurance to extending its services to encompass all aspects of general insurance for the broader construction industry.
Broking manager Laurence Gottlieb discusses the significance of insurance coverage for design professionals and the evolving landscape of liabilities and risks.
Adair Winder: Planned Cover is now in its 50th year – that’s quite the milestone. Can you speak to the different services that Planned Cover provides?
Laurence Gottlieb: We provide all insurance lines, professional indemnity, liability, office insurance, vehicle insurance and so forth – that is the insurance broking side of it.
We also have a risk management division, which is called Informed By Planned Cover, so that comprises a team of risk managers, who are all legally qualified. They assist all our professional indemnity clients in undertaking contract reviews. So our client, let’s say an architect, will send a contract that has been drawn up by their client’s solicitors, and it may contain all sorts of onerous terms and conditions, which may infringe or impact on their professional indemnity insurance. Our risk manager would provide an insurance review based on the professional indemnity implications of signing particular clauses. Our clients can then go back to their clients and try and negotiate for more acceptable terms.
That other role of our risk management division is to facilitate risk management seminars, which are presented either in-house or by webinar to our clients. The seminars are all related to the construction industry and they cover a whole host of topics from basic risk management to document management and then to more specific subjects, such as contractual indemnities, specifications and novation. Beyond that, we also have a suite of about 50 practice guides on all kinds of topics for our clients to access.
AW: We are going through challenging times in terms of economics and the environment. Has that had any impact on the products and services that Planned Cover offers?
LG: Not directly. The insurance market generally has been through quite a difficult time in the past few years. Rates have increased significantly on all products and professional indemnity in Australia has been hit hard. There’s all sorts of factors involved in economic supply chain issues […] claims are costing more to settle and to manage.
Climate change is sort of a watching brief for most insurers at the moment. There’s no specific exclusions at this stage related to that. Insurance is quite reactive.
AW: Planned Cover provides profession-specific protection in the built environment industry. How crucial is it to have the support of an organisation that understands the inner workings of the industry?
LG: It is very important to have advisors and insurers who understand the market, the legislation and the climate to ensure as much protection as possible. The professional indemnity, all it really is, is a risk transfer mechanism, in that, it transfers as much risk as possible to an insurance company, so the client can get on with business. Planned Cover is able to provide bespoke endorsements for certain clients who require specific wordings, and that really ensures that the client gets the protection they need, however complex the situation may be.
Obviously, you can never insure all risks. All policies have terms, conditions and exclusions. For instance, one of the major risks that has been prevalent for nearly a decade now is the combustible cladding. All insurers now have some form of cladding exclusion where non-compliant cladding is not protected by cover and some practices have really been exposed to this. It is critical to ensure that the practice not only understands what the policy covers but also understands the risks that they can be exposed to. There is no point in saving a few dollars if it’s going to potentially put you or your business at risk.
Planned Cover is celebrating its 50 years of business with fresh branding. To find out more about the services the company provides design professionals, visit the website.
