Nanny Insurance - why should I have it?
Posted on 12th March 2024
This article explores why you should have insurance to protect you in your Nanny employment.
As a nanny, you are legally employed – however by a much smaller ‘company’ than working in other industries. As such its easy to forget that as a professional employee, you may need legal cover. This is to protect you and your career.
As a nanny, you have a legal responsibility to keep the children in your care safe, as well as your employers home and property. Holding a Nanny insurance policy provides you with legal support and legal costs/compensation if you as a nanny are at fault in any way. Hopefully you’ll never need to make a claim, but having nanny insurance provides you (and your employer) peace of mind.
So what is nanny insurance?
Nanny insurance provides you as an employee with financial protection if there is an incident whilst you are working. Nanny insurance is essentially a specialist public liability insurance policy.
Public liability insurance covers you if a child in your care (or a visitor to your workplace, i.e. another nanny) suffers an injury caused by your negligence, or if your charge causes damage to third party property (or you yourself do).
Typically they provide up to £5million of cover for compensation, costs and expenses (‘level of indemnity’) and up to £100,000 of legal expenses.
Other things that can be covered (do check with your chosen policy provider):
Legal defence costs
Travelling abroad with your work family.
Personal accident cover (sometimes also illness cover) up to £50,000 *nannytax
Debt recovery
Contract disputes and other employment disputes
Morton Michel also offers the policyholder access to free online training courses that are geared towards childcare professionals to further your learning and development. They also provide legal helpline, tax helplines, risk assessment templates, and a counselling helpline. They can also assist with HMRC investigations.
Nanny insurance will not cover anything happening in a motor vehicle – separately you will need business insurance on your car insurance.
Why do I need it? My employer has insurance.
Employers liability insurance is to the employers benefit, and will not cover any negligent act by you. Your employer legally needs to have employers liability insurance in place but this does not protect you.
As nannies are not regulated, you don’t legally have to hold insurance – however it is a requirement if you register with Ofsted so its good professional practice to keep it up to date.
Where can I take out a nanny insurance policy?
The two best known companies that offer Nanny Insurance are:
Morton Michel: at time of writing, price is approx. £75 per annum for Ofsted registered nannies, or £85 per annum if not registered (or in the process of registering) with Ofsted
However using THIS LINK will automatically include 10% off your policy.
NannyInsure: at time of writing, price is £59 per year. You can take out a policy HERE.
Share this post: