If you are a self-employed tradesman or small business, your livelihood could be ruined by one simple error. Public Liability insurance is designed to shield you from this, by covering you against damage to property occurring in the course of your trade. Cover can be arranged for up to £10 million, and is now often a requirement for corporate employers.

Unfortunately the culture of claiming millions of dollars in damages for anything and everything has found its way across the Atlantic and we are now seeing huge rises in premium costs for all types of liability insurance. Even more disturbing is the fact that fewer and fewer insurers are offering policies, making it ever harder to get underwriters to cover particular risks.

An equally frustrating situation is that many councils and organisations are demanding that public liability insurance be in place before their buildings, grounds or playing fields can be used for leisure purposes such as exhibitions, fetes, parties or whatever. The cost of insurance for such a one-off event has risen to ridiculous levels and I'm afraid that we are now looking at premiums of at least £100 for such cover.

Having painted such a gloomy picture, we are delighted to be working with 2 of the UK's leading liability insurers.

Insuredrisks.co.uk is one of the leading providers of online business insurance. Since starting at the end of 2002, the company has issued over 30,000 online policies. Try their link first, answering just 6 simple questions will get you an online quote for either public or employers and public liability. Policies can be bought online and all certificates, policy documents are delivered electronically for you to print immediately. Should your trade or profession not be covered by the online quote system insuredrisks.co.uk has access to Lloyds brokers that enables almost all risks to be covered.

Insuredrisks.co.uk is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.

Quoteline Direct, the leading UK online insurance broker,have an excellent record of placing public and employers liability insurance with a variety of insurers and Lloyds syndicates at very good prices. Although theirs is not an online quote system (you fill in an online form and wait for them to come back with a quote), they do have tremendous flexibility and might just be able to find a reasonably priced quote where other insurers have not been able to arrange cover. Bear in mind that liability insurance is a very specialised field, it isn't offered by any of the big online insurers and it's often a case of knowing who to approach for a particular type of risk. This is the knowledge that Quoteline Direct has, they are specialists in their field and all of their business is placed with top rated insurers and Lloyds syndicates.

The service is entirely free and you are under no obligation to take up any quotation supplied.