Income Protection For Lightning Conductor Installers

Most height trades work on structures designed to be worked on. This one frequently does not, and that is a genuine distinction worth making.

A Victorian spire, a parapet with eroded mortar, or a redundant chimney stack may not reliably take an anchor, a ladder foot or a person's weight. The assessment of what will hold is part of the skill, and the failure mode is the building giving way rather than a mistake by the worker.

It is also why platforms and scaffolding are often not an option: erecting them would mean loading the very fabric in question, or the building is listed and the intervention is not permitted. So the access is ladders, rope and the structure, and the work should be described that way rather than as ordinary electrical installation at height.

There is a less obvious exposure in this trade that rarely makes it onto a form.

Church towers, spire voids and disused chimneys accumulate decades of bird droppings, bat guano, dust and debris, and the work means spending hours in them. The respiratory and infection risks from that are real and recognised, and bats in particular bring legal constraints on when work can happen at all.

The insurance point is simply that any resulting condition is assessed like any other illness, and that anything already on your record respiratory is better declared than left off. Our page on lung conditions covers what we would ask.

A sole trader has no death in service, so the household has whatever has been arranged privately and nothing else.

There is a second point specific to a small specialist firm. The contracts and the testing cycle have real value, but much of that value is the named person the building owners trust, so the business is a poor substitute for cover.

What is worth covering is the mortgage, any finance on a van and equipment, and the years of income a household would need, with no offset against it.

The ending in this trade is usually a diagnosis or injury that rules out climbing, in somebody whose entire earning power depends on it.

That person is not unemployable, which is precisely the problem: they are employable at a fraction of the rate, permanently, and income protection is least suited to a permanent downgrade once suitable alternative work exists.

A lump sum turns that into a decision rather than a drop. The routes out are real: design and specification of lightning protection, surveying and risk assessment, training, and running a firm where employed engineers do the climbing.

Most lightning protection businesses are two or three people, which makes the owner's absence close to total.

Vehicle finance, insurance, equipment and calibration of test instruments all continue, and any employed engineer's wages continue while the work they can certify unsupervised may be limited.

Cover can be sized to include those continuing costs as well as personal income. Where you trade through a limited company, executive income protection lets the company hold and pay for it, and relevant life cover can do the same for the life element.