School hire Opinions Sought

[gibbothegreat]

I'm coming at this from a slightly different point of view, which is as the tech manager of a local authority venue. We're simply not allowed to use a supplier that doesn't have Public Liability Insurance of at least £5M, and that includes performers.

 

Where would you expect liability to stop though. For example if you hired some speakers and stands which you rigged yourself and someone fell into one causing it to fall on someone else, where would the liability fall? Surely not with the supplier.

 

As Tim says, it's not really about that: in the event of an incident, my judgement about how blame should be apportioned will be a wholly minor factor, there will be whole departments of people (H&S, Risk and Insurance, heads of Service)within the council who will take their view on that, and the insurance companies - well, they will play their game in their way, and at my level, I wouldn't expect to have any dealings with them beyond reporting the incident in the first place.

 

The policy of not allowing us to use a supplier who can't produce details of their PLI isn't immediately about dividing liability in advance: it's much cruder than that, in that they don't want ever to find themselves in a situation of a dispute where the supplier was at fault, and didn't have insurance to cover the liability. The people who make that policy are not in a position to scrutinise every supplier the council uses and make individual decisions on whether that's necessary, and they wouldn't trust us minions to do it, so a blanket requirement is the only practical policy. As stated above, it does also act as a small reassurance that we are dealing with properly constituted companies, again with a view to minimising avenues of uncovered liabilities if it all goes wrong either financially or in the case of incidents.

 

 

Just out of curiosity, I'm not clear whether your objection is to being asked for it, or to being required to have it at all?

[MarkBarl]

Just out of curiosity, I'm not clear whether your objection is to being asked for it, or to being required to have it at all?

 

Neither. We have PLI and supplied a copy of the certificate. I am more interested in exploring the wider situation, where, without realising it, by being helpful, we may have inadvertently opened ourselves up to wider liability. I think the responses have provoked an interesting dialogue which is certainly causing me to look more carefully at the whole area of liability. I think the earlier comment regarding itemising on the invoice even if no charge was made for setting up the equipment was very useful. This clearly puts it as part of the "business service" which will be covered by the PLI rather than a favour which would most likely not be covered.

 

It is very useful to examine where we might reasonably be held responsible and ensure that we recognise where we are responsible and ensuring that both we and the customer are clear where each others responsibility lies.

[Jivemaster]

IMO like truck rental vs car hire you need to be very up front about what is included and what is not. (Car hires are insured Rented trucks may well not be)

 

If it's a dry hire then the discussion before contract needs to make clear that insurance is the responsibility of the user and that loss, damage and consequential loss must be covered.

 

One of the reasons why schools get charged higher prices is because they usually expect more than average service -you hire it to them then have to erect it foc etc, or more likely you sell them something, then have to go in every year to teach the new staff how to use it -all FOC!