What Insurance Should Charities and Community Groups Consider?
Ask ten charities what insurance they need, and you’ll get ten different answers. The charity insurance specialists within Jensten Group work with everything from community centres and food banks to homelessness support services, day centres for people with learning difficulties, touring theatre companies, community foundations, and even a charity running both a shop network and a working animal rehabilitation centre. No two of them need quite the same programme, because the right cover depends on what your organisation does, who it works with and how it’s run.
There are over 170,000 registered charities* in England and Wales alone, and no two insurance programmes look quite the same across them. This guide walks through the main types of insurance charities and community groups tend to consider, when each one is likely to matter, and how to work out what’s relevant to your organisation rather than what simply sounds sensible to have.
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Key Takeaways
If you only read one section, make it this one.
The right insurance for your charity depends on your activities, your people and your legal responsibilities, not a single fixed package. In broad terms:
- Public liability insurance matters if you work with the public, run events or use community venues.
- Employers’ liability insurance is required if you employ staff.
- Professional indemnity insurance is worth considering if you provide advice, training, counselling or providing other support services.
- Trustee liability insurance can help protect trustees and committee members against claims linked to governance decisions.
- Property, contents, cyber and event cover may all come into play depending on how your organisation operates.
A specialist charity insurance broker can help you work out which of these apply to you, and just as usefully, which ones don’t.
What’s Included in Charity Insurance?
A typical charity insurance programme might draw on some or all of the following: public liability, employers’ liability, professional indemnity, trustee liability, employment practices liability, buildings and contents cover, business interruption, cyber insurance, legal expenses, event or fundraising extensions, commercial vehicle or minibus cover, and personal accident cover.
Not every charity needs every element on that list, and that’s the point. According to NCVO around 80% of charities in England and Wales have an annual income under £100,000, while organisations with income above £10 million make up under 1% of the sector but account for roughly 57% of its total income. A small volunteer-led group hiring a hall a few times a year has very different requirements from a charity running multiple community centres and employing staff nationally, and their insurance should reflect that gap. Charities also change over time. As services grow, staff are taken on or fundraising activity shifts, it’s worth revisiting your cover to check it still reflects how you work.
Public Liability Insurance for Charities
Do charities need public liability insurance? There’s no blanket legal requirement, but for any organisation that interacts with the public, or an organisation that runs a community transport programme, it’s often one of the more important covers to have in place.
Public liability insurance is there to help if someone alleges they’ve been injured, or their property has been damaged because of your charity’s activities. That could come up in all sorts of everyday charity work: fundraising events, community centres, sponsored walks, volunteers working in public spaces, visitors on your premises, or outreach delivered directly in the community.
It’s also worth knowing that councils, landlords, venues and grant funders will frequently ask to see evidence of public liability cover before they’ll let an event go ahead, or a room be hired. So, while it isn’t compulsory in the way employers’ liability is, it’s often expected by the people and organisations you work alongside, which is really what sits behind questions like do charity businesses need public liability insurance?
Whether it’s a community centre hiring out rooms for classes and events, or volunteers running a stall at a local fair, the exposure to a genuine third-party claim is real even when everyone involved is being careful.
Allegations of abuse are another area that charities working with vulnerable people need to understand. It can be confusing where this cover actually sits, as it may fall under public liability or professional indemnity depending on the insurer, and it isn’t always spelled out in the policy wording. In some cases, it may even be covered on a silent basis, meaning the policy doesn’t explicitly exclude it, but doesn’t explicitly confirm it either. This is exactly why it’s worth checking with your broker rather than assuming, so you know precisely where you stand. Reputational risks, such as libel or slander, are usually addressed separately and often fall under trustee liability or professional indemnity cover.
Claims Made vs Claims Occurring
Charities often overlook the crucial difference between “claims made” and “claims occurring” policies, which can have significant implications.
Professional indemnity insurance is almost always written on a claims made basis. This means the policy that responds is the one in place when the claim is made, not the one in place when the advice or service that led to it was delivered. So, if a piece of advice given three years ago leads to a complaint today, it’s today’s policy that needs to be active and appropriately structured to pick it up, not the one you held at the time.
This is where retroactive dates become critical. Your retro date marks how far back your current policy will cover incidents, and if it isn’t set correctly, you could find yourself with no cover at all for something that happened before your current policy started, even if you had insurance in place at the time.
A claims occurring basis of insurance covers incidents that happen during the policy period, regardless of when the claim is reported.
Professional Indemnity Insurance for Charities
Do charities need professional indemnity insurance? It depends on what your charity does, particularly whether you give advice or deliver professional-style support.
Professional indemnity insurance is designed for situations where someone alleges that advice or guidance you provided caused them financial loss or harm. It tends to be most relevant for charities delivering counselling, advocacy, employment support, welfare or debt advice, legal guidance, training, or health and wellbeing services.
This is a growing area for the sector. More charities now deliver specialist support, particularly in welfare, mental health and community services, and that shift brings a different kind of exposure than a charity that simply runs events or holds a physical space. It doesn’t mean every charity needs this cover, but if advice or guidance is a core part of what you do, it’s worth having the conversation with a broker.
One important distinction: professional indemnity insurance is not the same thing as protection for your trustees personally. If you’re weighing up whether charity directors should take out professional indemnity insurance, the more accurate answer is usually that trustees and directors are better served by trustee liability or management liability cover, which is built specifically around governance risk rather than professional advice.
Employers’ Liability Insurance for Charities
Does a charity need employers’ liability insurance? If you employ staff, the answer is yes, and this is one of the few areas of charity insurance that carries an actual legal requirement under UK law.
Employers’ liability insurance helps protect your organisation if an employee is injured or becomes unwell because of their work and brings a claim against you. It’s entirely separate from public liability insurance, which covers claims from members of the public rather than your own staff. Under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, most employers, charities included, must hold at least £5 million of cover, and the Health and Safety Executive can fine an organisation up to £2,500 for every day it operates without suitable insurance in place.
Where charities often get caught out is in how the policy treats people who aren’t straightforwardly “employees”: volunteers, trustees, interns, and those on temporary or work-experience placements. Different insurers draw these lines differently, so it’s worth checking the detail rather than assuming everyone working for your charity is covered in the same way. It’s also increasingly common for charities to operate from more than one site or have staff working remotely, and most modern policies are built to reflect that rather than assuming everyone works from a single office.
One area the One Broker charity team at Jensten Insurance Brokers (East) sees growing demand for is employment practices liability, which sits alongside employers’ liability rather than replacing it. This covers claims linked to employment disputes such as unfair dismissal, discrimination or grievance handling, which have become a more frequent source of claims for charities as funding pressures drive restructures and redundancies. It’s worth asking your broker whether this is included or available as an addition.
If you’d like a review of your insurance program, get in touch with the charity insurance team at One Broker, which is part of Jensten Group, here: 01206 986695
Trustee Liability and Management Liability Insurance
Trustees carry real legal responsibility, even though most people take on the role to give something back rather than out of any sense of personal risk. That gap between intention and exposure is exactly what trustee liability insurance, sometimes called trustee indemnity or management liability insurance, is designed to address.
This cover can help protect trustees, directors, committee members and officers when acting within the scope of their official duties and responsibilities for the charity. If a claim is made against them personally in connection with decisions taken in their capacity as a trustee, director, committee member or officer, the policy may provide protection. This could include allegations of breach of duty, mismanagement of funds, employment-related decisions, regulatory investigations or, in some cases, reputational claims such as libel or slander, depending on the policy.
It’s worth being clear that this is a different type of cover from professional indemnity. Professional indemnity relates to advice or services the charity delivers; trustee liability relates to governance and decision-making at the board level. Many charities benefit from having both, considered separately rather than assuming one covers the other. Trustees can still face investigation or legal action over decisions made in good faith, and defending that position can carry high legal costs even where no wrongdoing is ultimately found, which is exactly why this sits alongside public and employers’ liability as a genuine consideration rather than an afterthought.
One assumption the One Broker charity team often hears is that simply being a registered charity offers automatic protection; it doesn’t. A useful way to think about it: imagine a trustee is responsible for keeping health and safety records up to date, and those records slip for a few years without anyone noticing. If a child is then injured during an activity and it comes out that the records weren’t maintained, the trustee who held that responsibility could personally face the cost of an investigation and any resulting claim, not just the charity. Trustee liability insurance helps protect trustees’ personal assets in situations like that, and it’s also increasingly relevant to attracting good trustees in the first place, since people considering the role are more aware than ever of the personal responsibility it entails.
Property, Contents, and Business Interruption Insurance
Plenty of charities rely on physical premises to do their work, whether that’s an office, a charity shop, a community centre, a food bank, a place of worship or a day centre, along with the equipment, donated stock and IT that sits inside them.
If your charity owns its premises, buildings insurance is likely to be relevant. If you rent or lease, contents insurance can help protect the equipment and assets you own within the space rather than the building itself.
Business interruption insurance is the one that’s easy to overlook and should be part of any organisation’s Business Continuity Plan. It’s there to help if an insured event stops your charity operating as normal, though cover typically only responds where there’s an accompanying material damage claim.
The impact of that goes well beyond the cost of repairs; activities are paused, events are cancelled, and income from things like room hire can be lost while the work of getting back up and running takes place. This risk is especially pronounced for property-led community charities. It’s common for a single community centre to run a school playgroup on one day, a private party at the weekend, and a faith group on a Sunday, all from the same building. If that building is out of action, several income streams stop at once, not just one, and rebuild timelines tend to be longer than they used to be. In fact, the standard 12-month indemnity period is not long enough in a lot of cases, due to delays in service from contractors, supplies being made available, etc. For that reason, 18- or 24-month indemnity periods are becoming more common. For any charity that relies on its premises to generate income or deliver services, this is worth factoring into the wider insurance picture rather than treating buildings cover as the whole story.
Cyber Insurance for Charities
Cyber risk isn’t just a large-organisation problem anymore. Charities routinely hold sensitive information about donors, employees, volunteers, service users and financial supporters, and rely on email, cloud-based systems, online fundraising platforms and payment processing to keep running day-to-day. Government figures bear this out: in the most recent Cyber Security Breaches Survey, 28% of UK charities, an estimated 57,000 organisations, reported experiencing a cyber security breach or attack in the past 12 months**.
If those systems are disrupted, whether through a data breach, ransomware, or another kind of cyber incident, the consequences can be significant: interrupted operations, the costs of recovery and incident response, and potential legal or regulatory obligations, depending on what happened. It’s a myth that ransomware and data extortion only target the biggest organisations. Charities that gather and hold detailed survey or interview data, such as advocacy or advice services, can be just as attractive a target, since that data has real value to hold to ransom, regardless of the charity’s size.
It’s also worth separating this from IT support. A good IT provider can help get your systems back up and running after an incident, but that’s a different job to covering the financial losses, legal costs and regulatory obligations that can follow, which is where cyber insurance comes in. A common misconception the charity team at One Broker comes across is assuming that holding a Cyber Essentials certification is the same as having cyber insurance; it isn’t. The two serve different purposes. Cyber Essentials may offer some cyber liability cover, but that’s not automatic, and the limits are often below the necessary amounts. For that reason, standalone cyber policies with adequate limits should always be discussed with your broker. Cyber cover can also respond to things IT support simply can’t, such as a member of staff being tricked into paying a fraudulent invoice that looked entirely genuine. No IT provider can reimburse for that loss, but the right cyber policy may.
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Event Insurance and Fundraising Covers
Fundraising events, whether that’s a sponsored walk, a community fair, a gala dinner, a golf day or a Christmas market, are often fundamental incomes for charities, but it’s worth checking whether your existing insurance covers them.
Some annual charity policies automatically include certain fundraising activities, while others require events to be declared in advance or insured separately due to the activities and number of attendees. Things to think through before an event include temporary equipment, hired venues, third-party contractors, food and drink suppliers, volunteer numbers, expected public attendance and any temporary structures being used. It’s also worth considering cancellation cover – especially if a lot of events are outdoors and could be cancelled due to adverse weather conditions. If your charity runs events regularly, it’s worth reviewing this ahead of each fundraising season rather than assuming last year’s cover still fits.
How To Choose the Right Insurance Options for Your Charity
A useful starting point is to think honestly about how your organisation works.
What activities do you carry out, and do they involve advice, community facilities, outreach or events? Do you work directly with the public, and do you employ staff or lean heavily on volunteers? Do you provide advice or specialist support services as part of your work? Do you own or occupy premises, and do you work with children or vulnerable adults, which brings its own safeguarding considerations alongside the insurance conversation? It’s also worth checking whether any funders, local authorities, landlords or venues require specific cover before they’ll work with you, and whether your existing policy still reflects how you operate now rather than how you operated when it was first arranged.
A good broker should also do more than just price up a policy. The One Broker charity team’s approach is to start from a sensible baseline for your organisation, then highlight where it’s worth going further, such as increasing trustee liability limits for a larger or more risk-exposed board or adding legal expenses or cyber cover for a modest increase in premium. It’s not always about finding the cheapest option; it’s about making sure your insurance program is right for you.
This is where a specialist charity insurance broker earns their keep. At Jensten Group, we have experience in dealing with unusual, challenging, and niche situations and have access to specialist schemes. The team at One Broker can help charities work through exactly this kind of review, identifying what’s genuinely needed and being equally clear about what isn’t.
Charity Insurance Should Match How Your Organisation Operates
There’s no single insurance policy that suits every charity, and there shouldn’t be. The right programme depends on your activities, your governance, your people and where your organisation is heading.
For some charities, public liability and employers’ liability will be the priority. Others will also need professional indemnity, trustee liability, cyber insurance, or business interruption cover because of the services they provide or the assets they rely on. Rather than chasing the cheapest policy available, it’s worth taking the time to understand the risks your organisation faces today and revisiting that picture whenever things change.
The team at One Broker works with charities, community groups and not-for-profit organisations across a wide range of sectors, helping them arrange cover that reflects how they really operate, whether that’s a volunteer-led community project, an organisation managing several premises, or a charity delivering specialist support services.
If you’d like to review your existing arrangements or discuss your organisation’s insurance needs, visit our Charity Insurance page to learn how the One Broker team, part of Jensten Group, supports charities and not-for-profit organisations with tailored insurance solutions. If you’re ready to make an enquiry now, call the One Broker charity insurance team on 01206 986695 Monday-Friday from 9am to 5pm, or you can send an enquiry online here at any time.
Sources
This article also draws on insight and real client examples shared by Jensten Group’s charity insurance specialists.
Charity Commission for England and Wales, Charity Commission annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025 (registered charity numbers).
NCVO, UK Civil Society Almanac (charity income distribution).
Health and Safety Executive, Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 (minimum cover and penalties).
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 (charity cyber breach prevalence).