Insurance Renewal: 7 Health and Safety Things Underwriters Ask For
Renewal is the one date in the year when somebody outside your organisation examines your health and safety arrangements and attaches a price to what they find. Regulators inspect a small fraction of workplaces. Clients ask periodically. Insurers ask every single year, without exception, and the answer moves a number on an invoice.
Most organisations treat the renewal questionnaire as an administrative task for whoever handles the broker relationship. That is a missed opportunity in both directions. A weak submission costs money on terms that are difficult to recover later, and a strong one is the cheapest argument available for the compliance spend that produced it.
Seven things get asked. Knowing what each is being used for changes what you send.
1. Claims and incident history
Asked for: typically three to five years of claims, often alongside incident data.
Used for: the base rate. This is the single largest determinant of your premium, and unlike everything else on the list it cannot be improved by presentation.
What can be improved is context. A claim with a documented investigation, an identified cause and a control that was implemented and verified reads very differently from the same claim with no accompanying narrative. The first indicates an organisation that learns. The second leaves the underwriter to assume the same thing could happen tomorrow.
Be precise about which events were reportable under RIDDOR or the equivalent national rules, because reportability and recordability are different thresholds, and figures that do not reconcile invite questions you do not want. HSE publishes the reportable categories.
2. Whether you record at all
Asked for: incident statistics.
Used for: a credibility check on everything else.
An organisation of two hundred office staff reporting zero incidents over three years has not demonstrated exemplary safety. It has demonstrated that nothing is being recorded, and an experienced underwriter reads it exactly that way. The submission that follows is then discounted, because if the incident data is not real, the rest may not be either.
Report the minor events. A visible, plausible, slightly untidy record is worth more than a clean one nobody believes.
3. Risk assessments and their currency
Asked for: confirmation, and sometimes copies.
Used for: establishing whether the management system exists in practice.
The examination is almost never of the content. It is of the dates and the coverage: one assessment per location rather than one for the organisation, and a review that postdates the last significant change. An assessment describing an office you left eighteen months ago is worse than useless, because it evidences that a system existed and stopped.
4. Named competence
Asked for: who advises you on health and safety.
Used for: distinguishing a managed organisation from an unmanaged one.
A named individual with a stated qualification, whether employed or engaged externally, reads entirely differently from "handled internally". The competent person arrangement is one of the few items on this list that is cheap to establish and immediately visible in a submission.
5. Enforcement history
Asked for: notices, prosecutions, formal interventions.
Used for: verifying candour, not history.
Notices and prosecutions in Great Britain are published on public registers by the HSE, and equivalents exist in most jurisdictions. The underwriter can and frequently does check independently before asking. A disclosed notice with evidence of closure is a manageable conversation. An undisclosed one that surfaces later is a disclosure problem, and disclosure problems affect whether a policy responds, which is a materially worse category of issue than a higher premium.
6. Property and premises documentation
Asked for: fire, and depending on the building, asbestos and water systems.
Used for: underwriting the physical risk directly.
Property insurers ask about fire specifically, and a current fire risk assessment reviewed since the last fit-out is the baseline expectation. For older buildings the asbestos management survey and plan are relevant. Where there are cooling towers, wet systems or infrequently used outlets, the legionella risk assessment and monitoring record apply.
Being a tenant does not remove these questions. It changes who holds the documents, which means you need to know what your lease allocates and be able to produce the landlord's evidence as well as your own.
7. Multi-country arrangements
Asked for: an increasingly common addition rather than a universal question.
Used for: understanding whether the group is genuinely managed or managed at headquarters only.
For an insurer covering a group, the concentration of risk is rarely in the London office that answers the questionnaire. A submission that speaks specifically to each entity, and to how local obligations are met in each jurisdiction, presents as a materially better risk than one that describes group policy and goes quiet on the overseas operations. This is the point at which global health and safety consultants earn their fee in a way that is directly measurable, because the improvement is visible in the terms.
What each item actually does
| Item | Effect on the outcome | Can it be improved this year | |---|---|---| | Claims history | Largest single factor in the rate | No, but context can be added | | Whether you record | Credibility of the whole submission | Yes, immediately | | Risk assessment currency | Evidence the system operates | Yes, quickly | | Named competence | Managed versus unmanaged impression | Yes, cheaply | | Enforcement disclosure | Whether the policy responds | Only by disclosing | | Property documentation | Direct physical underwriting | Yes, with lead time | | Multi-country picture | Group risk assessment quality | Yes, with support |
Five of the seven can be improved before the next renewal. The one that cannot is the one everyone focuses on.
The argument this gives you internally
Health and safety spend competes against things with visible returns, and usually loses. Renewal is the exception, because it produces a number.
Two practices make the argument concrete. First, ask the broker specifically what improved and what did not after each renewal, and record it. Over three cycles that becomes evidence rather than assertion. Second, time the improvements to the cycle: health and safety audits completed and acted upon three months before renewal produce documentation that is current at the point of submission, whereas the same work completed a month after renewal sits unused for eleven months.
For groups, the practical constraint is usually retrieval rather than substance. The material exists somewhere in each country and cannot be assembled quickly, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more in combination than either alone. Comparable national datasets such as HSE statistics are also useful for sense-checking your own figures before an underwriter does.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite builds and evidences the arrangements that renewal submissions describe, which is considerably more useful than helping complete the form in the last week. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with insurance, finance and banking and legal organisations, which means we see both sides of this process regularly.
Where a group spans several countries, our international health and safety consultants confirm that each entity meets its own national requirements, which is what turns a group submission from an assertion into an evidenced position. If renewal is within six months, a free gap analysis will identify which of the seven items you would currently struggle to answer well.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
