The paperwork your insurer will ask for after a claim

I run a scaffolding company, and for years I had a lazy idea in my head of how an insurance claim works. You have an accident, you ring the insurer, they send someone out, they pay. Simple. Then I actually looked into what happens on a serious claim - the kind with real money and a real injury attached - and I realised my mental picture was almost completely wrong. What actually happens is an investigation, and that investigation is, at its heart, a paperwork inspection. The insurer is not asking whether you are a good firm. They are asking whether you did what your policy and the law required, and whether you can prove it, document by document. This piece is the list of what they ask for, in the order it tends to matter, so you know exactly what "being covered" really rests on - and why every single item has to have existed before the accident, not after.

First, and above everything: the RAMS for that job

The first thing they want, and the document more claims turn on than any other, is the risk assessment and method statement for the specific job where the incident happened. I need to stress the word specific, because this is where most trades come unstuck. A loss adjuster is not impressed by a folder of general RAMS. He wants the one for that job, on that site, and he is reading it to answer a single question: did this firm identify the hazard that caused the harm, and did it have a control in place for it?

If you can hand over a site-specific RAMS that named the actual risk - the fall, the collapse, the contact with the live cable, whatever it was - and set out how you were controlling it, you have handed him the strongest thing you own. It shows a firm that saw the danger coming and managed it. If instead you produce a generic template that could have been printed for any job in the country, you have handed him the opposite: proof that you had a system which never once considered the thing that actually went wrong. A generic RAMS does not sit on the fence in a claim; it actively works against you, because it demonstrates the gap between the paperwork and the reality. And if the RAMS was never signed by the men on site, the adjuster clocks that too - because an unsigned RAMS proves only that a document existed somewhere, not that a single person doing the work had ever read it or worked to it.

Proof that the person was trained and competent

Next he wants to know about the person. Whoever was doing the work when it went wrong - were they actually trained and competent to do it? Not "were they experienced", not "had they been doing it for years", but can you prove, with a record, that this specific individual held the training and the tickets for this specific task? For a scaffolder that is the CISRS card for the work being done; for other trades it is whatever ticket matches the job. The insurer will want the records for the exact people who were on that job on that day.

This trips firms up more than you would think, because competence feels so obvious from the inside. Of course he was competent - I have known him fifteen years, he could do this in his sleep. But "I have known him fifteen years" is not evidence, it is a character reference, and a loss adjuster cannot bank it. A dated training record, a valid card, a certificate with his name on it - that is evidence. If you use labour-only subbies or bring men in for a big job, this is exactly where a gap can open up, because you are relying on competence you have never actually documented.

The inspection and maintenance records for the kit

If any equipment was involved - and in my trade there almost always is - they will want its inspection and maintenance history. A scaffold has statutory inspection requirements. Towers, MEWPs, ladders, plant, lifting gear - all of it has to be in serviceable order and, in many cases, formally checked and recorded. The adjuster is looking for the record that the inspection happened, when, and by whom, because that is what shows the equipment was fit to be used at the moment it was being used.

In my experience this is the single easiest record to let slip, and therefore one of the commonest reasons a claim runs into trouble. Everybody inspects. Not everybody writes it down, every time, in a way they can produce two years later. The inspection you did but never recorded is, to an insurer, an inspection that did not happen - and on a claim involving that piece of equipment, that missing record can be the whole ballgame.

Your health and safety policy

If you employ five or more people, the law says you must have a written health and safety policy, and the insurer will expect to see it - so this one is a straightforward pass or fail. But beyond the legal line, the policy does something subtler in a claim: it shows there was a system. It says that in this business, safety was something managed on purpose, not left to whoever happened to be on site that day. A current, genuine policy that actually reflects how you work carries real weight with an investigator. A policy that is three years out of date, or is so obviously an off-the-shelf template that nobody has ever read it, carries the opposite - it whispers that the safety management was for show.

The one everybody forgets: the sign-off

Now the record trades miss more than any other, and the one I would beg you to sort out if you do nothing else after reading this. It is not enough that a RAMS or a method statement existed. The people who did the work had to have been briefed on it and signed to say they understood it. That signature is not bureaucracy - it is the single piece of evidence that connects the document on the shelf to the man on the scaffold. It is how you prove, after the event, that the operative actually knew the hazard and knew how it was supposed to be controlled.

Think about it from the adjuster's chair. When he is deciding whether you took reasonable precautions, "there was a method statement" and "the operative was briefed on the method statement and signed it that morning" are two completely different answers. The first is a document. The second is a defence. Toolbox talks do the same job for the shorter day-to-day briefings, and the same logic applies: the value is not in having given the talk, it is in being able to show who was there and that they took it in. Without the sign-off, all your good work upstream - the perfect site-specific RAMS, the proper method - loses most of its power, because you cannot prove it ever reached the person it was written for.

See it in Complys

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Complys asks the right questions for your trade and project, then drafts a full Risk Assessment and Method Statement around your answers - proper RAMS, not generic templates, with live UK legislation cited. Start free: 90-day trial, 150 credits (around 13 full RAMS), no card needed.

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The supporting cast: COSHH, toolbox talks, the accident book

Behind the headline documents sit the smaller ones, and while none of them is likely to be the single record a claim turns on, together they paint a picture. If hazardous substances were in play, a COSHH assessment for them. Toolbox talk records showing you brief your people regularly, not just when an inspector is due. Your accident book - and if the incident was reportable under RIDDOR, evidence that you actually reported it in time. An investigator forming a view of your business notices whether these things exist. A firm that can produce them looks like a firm that manages safety as a habit; a firm with an empty accident book and no toolbox talk records looks like one that does the minimum and hopes. You want to be the first kind, because the overall impression colours how every borderline question in the claim gets decided.

Why one gap can sink the whole thing

Here is the part that genuinely worries me, and the reason I do not treat any of this casually. An insurer assessing a claim is not marking you out of ten and paying a proportion for a decent effort. They are looking for one thing: a breached policy condition connected to the loss. That means the claim does not turn on the overall quality of your paperwork - it turns on the specific record that relates to what actually happened. You could have immaculate compliance across ninety-nine areas of your business, and if the claim is a fall and the one thing missing is the working-at-height risk assessment and the scaffold inspection, that single gap can be enough to refuse a claim worth more than every premium you have ever paid in your life. It is not fair, exactly, but it is how the contract works. Which is why the answer is never "keep most of it". It is "keep all of it, keep it current, and be able to find it fast". I have written about how this bites specifically for a fall claim and for public liability.

The trap: you cannot make it later

Everything on this list shares one unforgiving feature: it has to have existed at the time of the work. You cannot write the RAMS after the accident. You cannot backdate a training record. You cannot invent an inspection that never took place - and you must never try, because that is fraud, it is worse than having nothing, and a serious investigation will find it. So the only real protection is one you have to build in advance, quietly, on the good days when nothing has gone wrong: capture the records as you go, keep them current, and store them somewhere you can produce them in minutes. The firms that come through a claim intact are not the ones who scrambled to assemble a file after the accident. They are the ones for whom producing the whole lot was a five-minute search, because it had all been captured properly at the time, as a matter of routine.

Where Complys fits

This whole list is the reason Complys exists, and the test I hold it to is simple: when the questions start, is the answer to every one of them "yes, and here it is"? It builds your site-specific RAMS and captures the team's sign-off, so the two records that matter most - a job-specific assessment and proof it was briefed - are there by default rather than by luck. It keeps training records, inspections, policies and toolbox talks on file, current, and searchable, so nothing quietly lapses — which is what keeping your compliance documents organised and current looks like in practice. Your site notes, photos and evidence sit with the job, time-stamped and located. And when you need to hand an insurer the complete file for one job on one day, it is a search, not an evening spent scrolling through ten thousand photos and rifling through a filing cabinet - which is the entire point of keeping your compliance in one place. For the bigger picture on why any of this matters, see will your insurance pay out if you have a claim?