Employers' liability insurance for a pub or restaurant: the £5 million cover, £2,500 a day fine and the certificate, worked for a first hire

The day you pay someone to work a shift behind the bar or in the kitchen, you are an employer, and that brings a legal duty many owners only meet later: employers' liability insurance. It is not the same as the public liability policy that covers a customer who slips on a wet floor.

What GOV.UK says

The GOV.UK page on employers' liability insurance sets out these points:

• You must get the insurance as soon as you become an employer.
• It must give cover of at least £5 million, from an insurer authorised to provide it. The page says you can check authorisation on the Financial Conduct Authority register.
• The fine for not being properly insured is £2,500 for every day.
• You must display the certificate where employees can read it, or make it available on an intranet, and show it to inspectors when asked. The fine for not doing so is £1,000.
• You do not need it if you employ only a close family member (the page lists spouse, civil partner, parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, and step or half relatives) or only people based outside England, Scotland and Wales.

The sum for a first hire

Say you take on your first bar worker, who starts on a Friday, and the policy is not in place until later. The fine runs per day, so the arithmetic is simple.

Add the £1,000 certificate fine to the 30-day row and the total is £76,000. These are the maximum figures from the page's wording applied to day counts we chose; what a court or regulator actually imposes in a given case is not something the page tells us. By comparison, the annual premium for a small pub is a fraction of one day's fine, but I did not read any premium data, so I will not put a number on it. Ask your broker.

Where owners slip up

• Treating a cheap casual as outside the rule. The page names only two exemptions: family-only and overseas-based staff. It says nothing about part-time, casual or short-notice workers, and I have not read the underlying Act or HSE guidance on whether a particular casual counts as an employee. Settle that point with your insurer before the shift, not after. Our guide to zero-hours bar staff covers the contract side.
• A policy that lapses. Every day without a proper policy counts. Put the renewal date in the diary and check the cover limit is still at least £5 million.
• Certificate in a drawer. The certificate has to be somewhere staff can see or reach. The back-office wall by the clock-in point is the usual spot.
• Forgetting it at hire. Add it to the day-one routine in the new starter checklist, beside the right to work check.

What I did not read

I did not read the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, the HSE pages, or any insurer's terms. The GOV.UK page does not say how long certificates must be kept, and I have not checked how limits work for a group of venues. I checked no premium prices.

Overlyft builds AI staff who join your pub or restaurant team and take the job of keeping the hiring paperwork in order: they remind you before a first shift that the policy, the certificate and the renewal date are in place, and a person approves each step.

This is general information, not legal or financial advice. Check the GOV.UK page and your policy with your insurer or broker.