Professional regulator the Architects Registration Board has unveiled proposals to change guidance on the professional indemnity insurance practices are expected to have in place amid rocketing costs for cover.

Practices have been reporting increasingly unaffordable PII costs since well before the pandemic, with the main driver seen as uncertainty related to the building-safety crisis exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire.

Earlier this year Yorkshire-based firm Gagarin Studio told BD it was facing an 11-fold hike in the cost of PII cover after several years when a doubling of cost had been the norm. The phenomenon of stratospheric price hikes is also accompanied by new demands for exclusions on the part of insurance providers, typically seeking to remove cover from work such as cladding, basements and pools, and fire safety.

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