The Employers’ Liability Tracing Office aims to make tracing insurance at the workplace easier for all parties, according to Mike Rafferty.

Employers in the UK, including charities, are required by law to buy employers’ liability insurance. Workplace injuries would be one example of where having employers’ liability insurance in place is crucial; industrial diseases such as emphysema are another. As long as the health problem can be attributed to the conditions of their work, an affected employee can make a claim against the employer’s liability insurance policy.

However, tracking employers’ liability insurance cover can sometimes get complicated as employees often move from job to job and an illness caused by one role may not become apparent until some years after that employment has ended. In other cases, when an illness manifests itself, the employer is no longer in business. It is, therefore, vital that claimants and their representatives can locate and identify the insurance company liable for the employers’ liability insurance of a particular employer at a particular time.

In order to improve the ability to trace past employers’ insurers, the insurance industry, in co-operation with the government, has founded the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office (ELTO). ELTO will hold records of a large number of insurers’ employers’ liability insurance policies allowing the rapid tracing of information necessary to claim.

Insurance companies are now in the process of transferring records to ELTO and most charities should have been contacted by their insurer asking for their employers’ reference number (ERN). This number is issued to the charity by HM Revenue and Customs and is sometimes known as Employer PAYE Reference, appearing on forms such as P45s, P60s and P11Ds.

Only a very few charities are exempt from holding an ERN, either because they have no employees or their employees are paid less than £503 per month each. Charities that have bought their insurance cover after 1st August 2011 should have already provided their ERN to their insurer. Charities that have bought their insurance cover before 1st August 2011 need to contact their insurer and provide their ERN number by 31st March 2012.

Mike Rafferty is head of property and casualty underwriting at Ecclesiastical Insurance