My Account
We compare quotes from leading insurers
STEEL FOUNDRY INSURANCE BUILT AROUND REAL CASTING RISK
Steel casting and foundry operations combine high heat, heavy plant, complex production workflows, strict QA requirements, and demanding customer contracts. A single incident - molten metal spill, furnace failure, fire, explosion, crane drop, batch defect or pollution event - can create severe losses across property, downtime, liability and product recall exposure.
Insure24 arranges specialist insurance programmes for steel foundries and casting businesses across the UK, designed to match your process (melt, pour, moulding, heat treatment, machining and dispatch), your site footprint, and your supply-chain obligations.
Who Needs Steel Casting & Foundry Insurance?
“Foundry insurance” isn’t one single policy - it’s a programme of covers designed to protect your site, people, equipment, stock, and liabilities. The right structure depends on what you cast, how you cast it, and what you agree to in contracts.
Insure24 can help steel casting businesses including:
- Steel foundries producing castings for engineering, energy, rail, marine, construction and heavy industry
- Investment casting (lost wax) and precision casting facilities
- Sand casting operations (greensand, chemically bonded sand, shell moulding)
- Pattern shops, core making and moulding operations
- Heat treatment and post-cast processing facilities
- Foundries with machining, finishing and NDT/inspection in-house
- Foundries handling customer-owned patterns, tooling and high-value materials
- Foundries with on-site scrap processing, melting, and furnace plant
Whether you supply standard parts or safety-critical castings, your insurance needs to reflect the severity potential of foundry losses: high heat + flammables + heavy lifting + complex QA + tight delivery schedules.
Steel Foundry Risks Insurers Care About
Foundry underwriting is highly risk-led. Insurers typically want to understand your process controls, housekeeping, fire protection, maintenance, and quality systems. Below are common risk themes that influence policy terms and premiums.
High-Severity Property & Fire Exposures
- Molten metal spill / run-out incidents damaging floors, pits and surrounding plant
- Furnace refractory failure, overheating, or electrical faults causing fire
- Dust and fume hazards (depending on materials and processes)
- Flammable storage: resins, coatings, fuels, oils, gases and consumables
- Hot works maintenance on plant and extraction systems
- Large single-site value concentrations (plant + building + stock)
Your fire strategy and protection (detection, suppression, separation, housekeeping, hot works controls) can be a major driver of terms.
Operational & Production Risks
- Furnace, induction power supply and control system breakdown
- Crane and lifting failures during ladle handling or heavy casting movement
- Cooling water / utilities interruptions impacting process stability
- Heat treatment failure leading to batch defects
- Quality escapes: inclusions, porosity, cracking, dimensional nonconformance
- Supply chain delays: scrap/material availability, consumables and refractory lead times
These can translate into business interruption, contractual disputes, and customer damage claims depending on end use.
Liability & Product Risk
Steel castings often become safety-critical components in machinery, structures, rail, marine, energy, and heavy industrial systems. If a casting fails, the claim can include injury, third-party property damage, and high legal/engineering investigation costs. Insurers will often want detail on end use, testing, traceability, QA and whether you hold any design responsibility.
Core Covers for Steel Foundries & Casting Facilities
Foundry insurance is usually built as a combined programme. The “right” combination varies, but the sections below explain the main covers and how they map to real foundry loss scenarios.
Property, Buildings, Plant & Stock (Fire / Perils)
Property insurance is designed to cover physical loss or damage to buildings, plant and contents caused by insured perils (often fire, explosion, storm, flood, escape of water, theft - depending on wording). For foundries, this often includes the high-value heart of the operation: furnaces, power supplies, cranes, extraction, moulding lines and finishing areas.
- Buildings (owned) or tenant improvements (leased premises)
- Contents including tools, benches, IT, racking and workshop equipment
- Stock: raw materials, alloys, consumables, refractories, moulding media
- Work in progress: moulds, cores, in-process castings
- Finished goods awaiting dispatch
- Customer goods (patterns/tooling) where correctly declared and insured
Key point: sums insured and correct descriptions matter. Foundry values can rise quickly with new plant, upgraded power supplies, and increased material/stock prices.
Business Interruption (Loss of Gross Profit)
Business interruption (BI) cover is designed to protect your trading position after an insured event (commonly linked to property damage). For steel foundries, the indemnity period is critical - it can take months to rebuild plant, replace refractory systems, repair power supply infrastructure, requalify production, and recover customer confidence.
- Loss of gross profit while output is reduced
- Increased cost of working (ICOW) to keep trading: outsourcing, overtime, expedited shipping
- Additional expenses to mitigate downtime (subject to policy terms)
Underinsurance is common in BI. We help you estimate realistic recovery timelines based on lead times for plant and specialist contractors.
Machinery Breakdown & Electrical Failure
Not all foundry losses involve fire. Internal mechanical/electrical breakdown can stop production even when the building is intact. Machinery breakdown cover is designed to respond to sudden and unforeseen breakdown of insured equipment, subject to wording.
- Induction furnace and power supply breakdown
- Control system/PLC faults and electrical failures
- Hydraulics and drives on moulding and handling systems
- Compressor and extraction plant breakdown
- Option to add BI for breakdown-triggered downtime (policy dependent)
Underwriters often ask for maintenance routines, critical spares strategy and breakdown history.
Public & Products Liability
Liability cover is designed to protect against claims for injury to third parties or damage to third-party property. For foundries, the risk profile often includes both site/visitor risk and product risk once castings are supplied into the supply chain.
- Public liability for visitors, contractors and third parties on site
- Products liability for damage/injury caused by supplied castings
- Legal defence costs (subject to policy terms)
- Completed operations where relevant (wording dependent)
Important reality check: many policies do not automatically cover the cost to remake your own defective castings (“making good”). They typically respond to injury/property damage claims. If you have batch risk exposure, ask about specialist extensions.
Employers’ Liability
Steel foundries involve high-severity injury hazards: heat, heavy lifting, cranes, moving plant, pinch points, noise and fume exposure. Employers’ liability (EL) is typically required in the UK where you employ staff and is designed to cover your legal liability for injury or illness suffered by employees arising out of their work (subject to policy terms).
- Injury claims (manual handling, burns, crush incidents, slips/trips)
- Occupational illness claims (noise-induced hearing loss, respiratory issues where applicable)
- Legal defence and investigation support (policy dependent)
Insurers often value robust evidence: training records, RAMS, maintenance logs, PPE enforcement and incident reporting.
Environmental / Pollution Liability
Foundry operations can create environmental exposures: storage of oils and chemicals, waste handling, run-off, emissions controls, and potential contamination incidents. Standard liability policies may have pollution limitations, so specialist cover may be relevant depending on your site and operations.
- Sudden and accidental pollution events (policy dependent)
- Clean-up costs and third-party claims where insured
- Waste and by-product handling exposures
- Off-site disposal and contractor interfaces
We’ll help you map your environmental risk and arrange the right scope where needed.
Defective Castings, QA Failure & Recall-Style Exposure
A major foundry pain point is not just a single accident - it’s a quality escape that triggers rework, batch rejection, customer downtime, or downstream damage. This is where expectations and insurance often diverge.
In many cases, standard products liability responds when a defective product causes third-party injury or third-party property damage and you are legally liable. However, the pure costs to remake the casting, scrap a batch, re-machine parts, or compensate a customer for production delay can be excluded or limited.
Common Defect Drivers in Steel Casting
- Inclusions, porosity, shrinkage and internal voids
- Cracking from thermal stress or cooling rate issues
- Dimensional drift from pattern wear or process variation
- Heat treatment failure affecting strength/ductility
- Material chemistry deviations / wrong alloy
- Inspection failure: NDT coverage gaps, documentation errors
Insurers and claims teams often focus on traceability and process control: can you demonstrate compliance and isolate affected batches?
How to Reduce the Financial Impact
- Robust traceability: heats, ladles, batches, patterns and machining routes
- Inspection plans and documented acceptance criteria
- Calibration records for measurement and NDT equipment
- Clear contract terms: limits of liability, warranty scope, exclusions for consequential loss
- Consider specialist extensions where available for recall/rectification-style costs
- Strong incident response: quarantine, communication, root cause analysis and corrective action
We can help you position your risk for underwriting - and avoid contract terms that create uninsurable exposures.
“Our foundry has high-value plant and tight delivery windows. Insure24 helped us build a programme that protected property, breakdown and business interruption - and made sure our liability cover matched our contracts.”
Foundry Manager, UK Steel Casting FacilityWhat We’ll Ask to Quote Steel Foundry Insurance
To obtain competitive terms, insurers need a clear presentation of your operations and controls. When you request a quote through Insure24, we’ll typically collect the information below (and help you present it in the most underwriter-friendly way).
Operations & Site Profile
- Turnover, staff count, and split by activities (casting, machining, heat treatment, finishing)
- Casting processes used (sand, investment, etc.) and products/end-use sectors
- Premises details (construction, occupancy, fire separation) and security
- Hot works controls and fire protection systems
- Storage of flammables, gases, oils and chemicals
- Environmental controls and waste handling arrangements
This helps insurers assess property severity risk and control quality.
Plant, Maintenance & BI Dependencies
- Machinery schedule: furnaces, power supplies, cranes, extraction, compressors, moulding lines
- Maintenance routines, service contracts, and inspection regimes
- Critical spares strategy and supplier support
- Production bottlenecks and outsourcing options
- Estimated rebuild/repair lead times for critical assets
- Claims history and risk improvements implemented
This is essential for machinery breakdown and business interruption placement.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
+-
What insurance does a steel foundry typically need?
Most steel foundries consider a package including Property (buildings/plant/stock), Business Interruption, Employers’ Liability, Public & Products Liability, and often Machinery Breakdown for furnace/power/control systems. Depending on activities, additional covers may include environmental/pollution liability, goods in transit, cyber, and specialist extensions for product risk.
+-
Will property insurance cover furnace and plant damage?
Property insurance is typically designed to cover damage caused by insured perils such as fire and other listed events, subject to policy terms. Internal mechanical or electrical failure may need Machinery Breakdown cover. The exact position depends on policy wording and how the loss occurred.
+-
How important is Business Interruption for foundries?
Very. Foundries can have long recovery timelines after major losses due to specialist plant lead times, refractory rebuilds, power supply repairs, and production requalification. BI can cover loss of gross profit and increased cost of working after an insured event, subject to the indemnity period and policy terms.
+-
Does products liability cover defective castings?
Products liability is generally designed to respond where a supplied product causes third-party injury or third-party property damage and you are legally liable, subject to policy terms. It often does not automatically cover the cost of remaking your own defective casting or purely contractual losses such as delay penalties.
+-
Do foundries need environmental / pollution cover?
It depends on your site and operations. Foundries may have exposures linked to oils, chemicals, waste, run-off and clean-up obligations. Standard liability policies can have pollution limitations, so specialist cover may be relevant where exposure is material.
+-
What liability limits are common for steel casting businesses?
Common public/products liability limits include £2m, £5m or £10m, often driven by customer contracts and worst-case exposure. The right limit depends on the end use of castings, where products are installed, and contractual requirements.
+-
How can a foundry reduce premiums?
Insurers typically reward strong controls: housekeeping and separation, hot works management, maintenance routines, electrical inspection, fire detection/suppression where appropriate, robust QA and traceability, and a clear claims/improvement narrative. Presenting your risk well can materially improve underwriting appetite and terms.
+-
How quickly can Insure24 arrange steel foundry insurance?
Once we have your activity description, site details, values/sums insured, plant schedule, risk controls and claims history, we can usually progress quotes quickly. If you need urgent documentation for a contract or audit, call us and we’ll prioritise your request.