Insurance-Backed Guarantees: What They Are and Whether Your Stove Installation Business Needs One
An insurance-backed guarantee isn't the same as your HETAS-required public liability cover, and mixing the two up in front of a customer can cost you the job. Here's what an IBG actually protects, what it costs, and when it's worth having one.
A customer on a £6,000 multi-fuel install asks a fair question at the kitchen table: "What happens to my guarantee if you're not around in five years?" If the honest answer is "well, you'd have to hope I'm still trading," you've just handed the job to whichever installer down the road can say something better.
That's what an insurance-backed guarantee is for, and it's a different thing from the public liability insurance you already carry as a HETAS registrant. A lot of installers assume one covers the other. It doesn't, and getting the two mixed up in front of a customer makes you look like you haven't thought it through.
Public liability insurance and an IBG protect against different things
HETAS requires registered installers to carry a minimum of £2 million in public liability insurance, and for anyone doing installation design work, a recommended £250,000 in professional indemnity cover on top. That insurance is there for the obvious scenario: you're on site, something goes wrong, a spark damages the carpet or a flue fitting fails and causes a leak, and the customer's property or a third party is harmed. It protects them from your mistakes while you're still trading.
An insurance-backed guarantee covers a completely different risk: what happens if you stop trading. If your business goes into liquidation, administration, bankruptcy, or you retire or die before the guarantee period on the installation runs out, the IBG is what pays out so the customer isn't left with a workmanship warranty from a company that no longer exists. Your own public liability policy is worthless to a customer once your business has closed down — there's nobody left to claim against. An IBG sits outside your business entirely, backed by an insurer, so it survives even if you don't.
Why this matters more for a home-quoted, cash-heavy trade
Stove and wood burner installs sit in an unusual spot. The jobs are big enough that customers are nervous about being left with a half-finished flue or a five-year workmanship promise from a business that's vanished, but small enough as trade businesses that closures, retirements, and sole traders stepping away aren't rare. A homeowner who's just read about a competitor's stove business folding, or who's simply cautious after being burned by a builder before, will ask about this more often than you'd think — and if your answer is a shrug, you've lost ground to whoever has a proper guarantee document to hand over.
It's also become a differentiator competitors use deliberately. Installers who've invested in an IBG often lead with it in their marketing precisely because it's still uncommon enough in this trade to stand out.
Where to actually get one
Insurance-backed guarantees for home improvement trades come from a small number of specialist providers rather than general insurers. The Consumer Protection Association (CPA) and Quality Assured National Warranties (QANW) both offer IBGs to trade businesses across construction and home improvement, and GGFi (trading as Installsure) is another established provider, though it's more heavily used in glazing. You apply as a business, they assess you, and then you register individual jobs (or bundles of jobs) under the guarantee, usually for a set premium per job or per £1,000 of contract value rather than a flat annual fee.
Worth checking when you compare providers: what triggers a payout (most cover liquidation, administration, bankruptcy, and the death or retirement of the business owner, but the exact wording varies), how long the guarantee period runs for, and whether there's a cap on the payout per job. Some providers, including the CPA, also bundle in deposit protection — cover for the customer's deposit if you go under before work even starts, typically capped at a percentage of the job value or a fixed amount, whichever is lower.
Whether it's worth it for a business your size
If you're a sole trader or small team doing mostly straightforward stove swaps under a couple of thousand pounds, an IBG is probably more cost and admin than the jobs justify, and your reputation and HETAS registration will usually carry enough weight on their own. The calculation changes once you're regularly quoting larger multi-fuel or bespoke installations, working with customers who don't know you from local word of mouth (online enquiries, aggregator leads, new-build developers), or up against competitors who already advertise one. At that point it's a relatively small cost per job set against a real chance of losing quotes to someone who can answer the "what if you're not around" question properly.
It's also worth being honest with yourself about the underlying issue it's solving. If customers keep asking this question, it's often because your business doesn't have much of a public track record yet — no reviews, no long trading history, nothing they can find that reassures them independently. An IBG is a legitimate fix for that gap, but so is simply being consistent about collecting reviews and keeping a visible record of completed jobs, and most installers benefit from doing both rather than treating the guarantee as a substitute for the rest.
What to tell a customer who asks
Be straightforward about the distinction: your public liability insurance protects them while you're on the job and trading; an insurance-backed guarantee protects the workmanship warranty itself if your business isn't around anymore. If you don't currently offer an IBG, say so plainly rather than letting the customer assume your PLI covers it — that's the version of this conversation that actually damages trust, not simply not having one yet.
If you do get one, it's another certificate and reference number to keep track of alongside HETAS registration numbers, flue liner warranty registrations, and job completion paperwork — and it needs to be attached to the right job, not just filed somewhere generic. That's exactly the kind of document BurnerCRM was built to sit alongside job records for, so when a customer or their solicitor asks for it two years later during a house sale, you're not digging through old email threads to find it. You can see how job and compliance records work in practice at burnercrm.co.uk.