Roger Flaxman, Chairman of Flaxman Partners insurance claims advocates, and Director of Lignum Risk Partners, gave his view to Time for Timber on the construction industry and how the sector needs to adapt to meet the needs of insurance.
Roger has been in the insurance industry since the 1970s, and has a huge amount of diverse experience there. Over his career, he has seen a huge number of construction related insurances from learning the job by insuring timber buildings in Scandinavia and northern Europe, to being the architect of some of the compulsory insurance schemes which were put together for the Law Society, accountants, architects, chartered surveyors and many others.
He sees one of the main problems of insuring the construction industry is the fragmented nature of the professions working within in.
“They are like lots of guilds. They have knowledge, they have got skills, they have professionalism. The problem is that even with all the technology and intercommunication they have, it is very difficult for those different birds, of different feathers, physically to get together and collaborate. It can be done, but it is difficult. All these organisations have different interests.”

"One of the things we really need to try to avoid is lots of different insurances applying at the same time, with different wordings, with different cultures that differ. Ideally, we have got to get to an insurance model which is based upon the project, particularly big ones, because it is illogical to have one contract between the client, the developer, all the others and yet dozens of contracts of insurance amongst all the people that have undertaken that they will be insured. What I know, as an insurance practitioner, is that those insurances can be so different, that you could ask yourself what value have they got?
Ideally what you want to look at is a way of saying, if we are going to have sustainable building and sustainable insurance you have got to be able to match those two things up front. That means possibly changing the way that the insurance is attached to the building - creating a building project insurance."
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