The vase was not expensive. It was, however, my mother’s, which is a category of value no insurer has ever managed to price properly. It went over when a cleaner I had booked for a one-off caught it with the flex of a vacuum, and in the silence that followed I realised I had no idea what happened next. Did she have insurance? Did I? Was this a “these things happen” moment or a “someone owes someone two hundred quid” moment? I had booked her the way most of us book a cleaner in London – a quick exchange of messages, a rate agreed, a key handed over on the doorstep – and at no point had the word “insured” come up in any form I could actually lean on.
That gap is the whole subject here. “Fully insured” appears on cleaning adverts across the city as reliably as “friendly and reliable,” and it gets treated as a single, settling fact when it is really a bundle of separate questions wearing one coat. What kind of insurance? Covering what, exactly? Up to how much? And, the question that matters most, would it actually pay out for the likeliest thing to go wrong in your home? Knowing what to confirm before you book is the difference between a genuine safety net and a phrase that only sounds like one.
First, an Uncomfortable Fact: Cleaners Do Not Legally Have To Be Insured
Public liability insurance is not a legal requirement for a self-employed cleaner in the UK. Nobody is breaking the law by turning up to clean your Battersea flat with no cover whatsoever. This trips people up, because we assume anyone operating as a business must carry insurance the way a driver must carry motor cover. They are not. It is a commercial norm and a mark of professionalism, but it is voluntary.
What that means for you is simple and slightly annoying: the responsibility to check sits with you. No regulator has done it on your behalf. A cleaner can advertise, take bookings, and work in a hundred homes across London without holding a penny of cover, and the only thing between you and that is whether you thought to ask. The good news is that proper cover is cheap – many cleaners pay somewhere around five to seven pounds a month for it – so anyone serious about the work has very little excuse not to hold it. The absence of it tells you something.
What Public Liability Actually Covers, and the Two Claims It Might Not
Public liability covers injury to other people and damage to other people’s property caused by the course of the work. In cleaning terms, the textbook examples are a client slipping on a floor that was just mopped, a vacuum flex bringing down a lamp, or a cracked window. If a visitor to your home trips over a bucket left in the hallway and hurts themselves, that is the sort of claim public liability exists to answer. So far, so reassuring.
Here is where it gets interesting, and where most people never look. Two of the most likely cleaning mishaps sit in awkward corners of a standard policy.
Damage to the things being cleaned
Many public liability policies exclude or heavily limit damage to property that was in the cleaner’s “care, custody and control” at the time. It is a dry little phrase that hides a large hole. When someone cleans your home, they are handling your possessions and working directly on your surfaces – which means those items are, by the policy’s own logic, in their care and control while the work happens. So the antique table being polished when it gets scratched, or the worktop being wiped when it chips, can fall straight through a bog-standard policy. The base cover is happiest paying for the lamp knocked over by accident, and far less comfortable with the object the cleaner was deliberately touching.
Damage caused by the cleaning itself
The second gap is treatment risk. If a product reacts with a surface and stains it, or a machine scorches a carpet, or the wrong solution strips the finish off a wooden floor, that damage was caused by the cleaning process rather than by a stray accident. Standard public liability often excludes exactly this unless the policy carries a specific treatment risk or accidental damage extension.
Put those two together and you reach the single most useful thing this article can tell you. The question to ask is not “do you have public liability insurance.” Almost everyone will say yes. The question is whether the policy includes treatment risk and accidental damage cover, because those are the extensions that actually respond when the cleaning is what caused the harm. A cleaner who knows the answer without stumbling is a cleaner who has read their own policy, which is its own quiet reassurance.
The Number Everyone Fixates On (and Why It Matters Least)
Ask about insurance and the first thing most people want is the figure. One million pounds of cover, two million, five. It feels like the headline, and cleaning firms present it that way, because a bigger number looks like more safety.
For domestic work it is largely a distraction. Cover limits of one to two million pounds are standard for cleaners working in private homes, and that is comfortably more than enough for the realistic worst case in a flat in Wandsworth or a terrace in Stoke Newington. Five million and upward tends to be a requirement of commercial contracts – the level a corporate landlord or a facilities manager insists on before a cleaning firm can bid for an office block – rather than anything a household needs. So when a domestic cleaner proudly leads with a five-million-pound limit, treat it as fine but beside the point. A high limit on a policy that excludes treatment risk protects you far less than a modest limit on one that includes it. Scope beats size every time.
Employers’ Liability: When It Becomes Your Concern Too
There is a second kind of cover that matters only in certain situations, worth recognising when you have wandered into one. Employers’ liability insurance is legally required, under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, for any business that employs staff. The statutory minimum is five million pounds, and operating without it carries fines that can reach two and a half thousand pounds for every day uninsured. This is not the soft, voluntary corner of the market.
For a solo self-employed cleaner with no employees, employers’ liability simply does not apply. But the moment you hire a small firm that sends a team, or book through an operation with staff on its books, it becomes relevant to you. If the person cleaning your kitchen is somebody’s employee and they injure themselves on your property – a fall on your stairs, say – their employer’s liability cover is what should respond. A firm with staff that cannot show you an employers’ liability certificate is a firm cutting a corner it is legally forbidden from cutting.
Keys, and the Cover Nobody Mentions
Handing over a key is the part of hiring a cleaner that quietly unsettles people the most, and it sits almost entirely outside standard public liability. If your keys are lost or stolen while in a cleaner’s care, the cost of changing the locks – and, in a mansion block or a shared conversion, potentially a communal system – is not something the base policy tends to touch.
What handles it is key cover, usually a specific add-on rather than something included by default. Where it exists, it pays for replacement keys, lock changes, and sometimes the security callout costs if a lost set creates a genuine breach. If you are handing over the only means of entry to your home to someone you booked online last Tuesday, this is a fair thing to ask about, and a slightly better answer than a shrug.
Whose Policy Actually Responds: The Agency Question
Booking through an agency introduces a wrinkle that catches a lot of people out. You might assume the agency’s insurance blankets everyone it sends, and sometimes it does. Often it does not. If the cleaner who arrives is genuinely self-employed rather than an employee of the agency, the agency’s employers’ liability will not cover them, and its public liability may or may not extend to their work depending on the exact wording.
Some agencies carry a subcontractor extension that stretches their cover over the self-employed cleaners they place, but that does not remove the cleaner’s own need for a policy – it simply adds a layer. The practical question to put to an agency is direct: is the specific person coming to my home covered, and under whose policy? A well-run agency answers cleanly. A vaguer one leaves you to discover the arrangement only after something has gone wrong, which is the worst possible moment to learn it.
How to Actually Confirm It in Thirty Seconds
None of this requires you to become an insurance adjuster. It requires one document and a quick glance. Ask the cleaner or firm for their certificate or schedule of insurance – a standard thing to request, and a professional will have it to hand rather than treating the ask as an insult.
When it arrives, four things are worth a look. Is it in date, with a period of cover that includes now rather than a policy that lapsed in the spring? Does the limit look sensible for the work? Do the listed business activities actually match the job – a policy written for office cleaning may not respond neatly to a domestic end-of-tenancy scrub, and the described activities matter more than the headline limit. And does the named insured match the person or business you are actually hiring, rather than a different trading name entirely? Those four checks take under a minute and close almost every gap that a “fully insured” badge leaves open.
The point of all this is not to approach your cleaner as a fraud investigator with a clipboard. It is that the word “insured” is quietly load-bearing, and it takes so little to find out whether it can hold the weight you are putting on it. A good cleaner will not mind the question in the slightest. It is, after all, exactly the question that separates the ones who take the work seriously from the ones who simply say they do.