business-interruption

---
name: business-interruption
description: Turns the business interruption section of your commercial combined or property policy into a plain record of every trigger it actually contains, the indemnity period and sum insured basis read from your own schedule, the trends clause quoted verbatim, a checklist built from the Supreme Court's FCA v Arch test case translated to your own wording, and a numbered question list for your broker, all dated. Use when you hold or are renewing a business interruption section and have not actually read past the figure on the schedule, or when you want to know what would happen to that figure the week your doors do not open.
---

# Every trigger, indemnity period and sum insured basis in your business interruption cover, read before the closure not after it

You give this your schedule, your policy wording, your endorsements, and a plain account of how trading would actually stop: a fire, a burst main, a flood two streets away, a notifiable disease outbreak, the council shutting the road outside, your one delivery supplier going under. You get back a trigger list naming every clause type the wording contains and every clause type it does not, the indemnity period read from your own schedule and tested against a realistic rebuild time, the sum insured basis quoted verbatim, the trends clause quoted and checked against what the Supreme Court said it can and cannot do, a checklist translating the FCA v Arch test case into a set of yes and no answers about this wording, and numbered questions for your broker. It will not tell you what indemnity period or sum insured to buy, and it will not tell you that a clause is covered because a court case with a similar name exists. No published figure exists for what a single independent UK hospitality business should carry, and the test case decided what certain clause types mean, not what your building is worth to you closed for a year.

## What it does

1. **Find every trigger the wording actually contains, before assuming yesterday's headlines apply to today's policy.** Business interruption cover responds either to physical damage to the premises, which is usually straightforward, or to a non-damage trigger, which is where the confusion lives. The FCA's finalised guidance for firms defines the non-damage category precisely: a relevant coverage clause is "one or more clauses (including any relevant exclusions and 'trends clause' or equivalent wording) which provide cover for business interruption losses in circumstances where there has been no physical damage to property: (i) if there is notifiable disease or some other categorisation of disease either at all or within a certain radius or within the vicinity of premises, or (ii) where some form of authority so acts or some happening is required as to prevent or restrict access to or use of the insured premises". The guidance records that "such clauses have been categorised in the representative sample of policy wordings in the test case as either 'disease' or 'denial of access'". Read your wording clause by clause and mark, against each named section, whether it contains a disease clause, a denial or prevention of access clause, a hybrid of the two, a utility failure clause, a murder or suicide clause, or a supplier or customer premises clause. A trade description on a policy summary is not the wording. Read the schedule's list of sections, then open the actual clause each one points to.

2. **Where a disease clause exists, read the radius and the definition of occurrence precisely, because that pairing decides everything.** The Supreme Court's press summary uses an RSA wording as its example: "this clause (like many other disease clause wordings) covers business interruption losses resulting from any occurrence of a notifiable disease within a specified geographical radius (typically 25 miles) of the insured premises." That 25 miles is an illustration from one wording considered in the case, not a figure to expect in yours: read the number your own clause states, because it may be 1 mile, 25 miles or absent entirely. The Court interpreted "occurrence" narrowly: cover responds "provided there had been an occurrence (meaning at least one case) of the disease within the geographical radius," with each case counted separately rather than in aggregate. Write down your clause's radius, its definition of occurrence if it gives one, and whether it names specific diseases or refers to notifiable disease generally.

3. **Where a denial or prevention of access clause exists, read what has to happen before it responds, because most require several things at once.** The press summary describes the shape: "prevention of access and hybrid clauses specify a series of requirements which must all be met before the insurer is liable to pay." One recurring requirement is a "restriction imposed" by a public authority, and the Supreme Court set the test as an instruction that "carries the imminent threat of legal compulsion or is in mandatory and clear terms and indicates that compliance is required without recourse to legal powers." A polite request from a council is not the same as a restriction in that sense, and your wording's own words for this, whether "prevented," "hindered," or "unable to use," each carry a different threshold. Write the exact verb your clause uses and the exact authority it names.

4. **Check for the exclusion that switches the trigger back off, because a clause can exist and still never pay.** The FCA's finalised guidance gives a worked example of exactly this trap: an insurer held a denial of access clause that would otherwise respond, but "the insurer's policy contains an exclusion stating that all losses arising from or relating to pandemics are excluded," so the clause "will not respond to the coronavirus pandemic" regardless of how the trigger itself reads. Search your wording for an exclusion sitting near or cross-referenced from the business interruption section, not only in the general exclusions at the front, and record its exact wording against the clause it disables.

5. **Read the indemnity period off your own schedule, and treat the range in the market as background, not as a target.** The indemnity period is the maximum length of time the insurer will pay for, and it is chosen at the point of sale rather than fixed by the type of business. Brokers describe policies as commonly written in six month steps, and one broker's guide states plainly that "financial losses will only be covered for a maximum time period specified in your policy schedule, known as the maximum indemnity period," and that once it has run out "any further loss of profit is not insured." That describes the mechanism, not a number to copy. The figure that matters is the one printed on your schedule, in months, and nothing else.

6. **Test the indemnity period against a realistic reinstatement estimate, because a successful claim can still leave months unpaid.** A claim can be accepted in full, on the right trigger, at the right sum insured, and the indemnity period can still run out before the business has actually recovered. If a fire takes eighteen months to rebuild from and the schedule's indemnity period is twelve months, the last six months of lost income are simply uninsured, whatever the claim paid for the first twelve. That is not a failure of the claim, it is a gap chosen at renewal and never revisited. Get a real estimate, a builder's figure, a quotation, or a professional valuer's assessment, and write the gap in months next to the schedule figure. Where no such estimate exists yet, say so and stop there rather than guess.

7. **Read the sum insured basis word for word, and leave the adequacy of the figure to the under-insurance skill.** Business interruption cover is written on one of a small number of bases: gross profit, gross revenue, or increased cost of working, and each measures something different and pays out differently. Copy the basis exactly as the wording states it, and copy the sum insured figure exactly as it appears on the schedule with the date it was set. This skill records what the basis is and what figure sits against it. It does not test whether that figure is enough: that comparison, the average clause, and the pro rata reduction that follows under-insurance belong to the under-insurance skill, and running two separate checks on the same figure produces two different numbers for the same thing.

8. **Read the trends clause, and know what the Supreme Court said it is and is not allowed to do.** Almost every wording carries one, and the press summary describes its purpose: trends clauses "provide for business interruption losses to be calculated by adjusting the results of the business in the previous year to take account of trends or other circumstances affecting the business in order to estimate as nearly as possible what results would have been achieved if the insured peril had not occurred." The Supreme Court held that "these clauses should not be construed so as to take away cover provided by the insuring clauses," and specifically that adjustments "do not include circumstances arising out of the same underlying or originating cause as the insured peril." For a Christmas-heavy trade this is the clause that decides whether a December closure is measured against last December's real figures or quietly averaged down against a quiet October. Copy the clause verbatim and record what it says the adjustment should account for.

9. **Hand the extraction and the arithmetic to Codex, and keep every reading of the wording here.** Run, from the folder holding the schedule, the wording and your own recorded readings:

   ```
   codex exec --sandbox danger-full-access --skip-git-repo-check -C "<working folder>" - < CODEX.md
   ```

   Claude hands over the trigger list with each clause type marked present, absent or not stated and every quoted clause, radius, exclusion and condition behind it, the schedule's indemnity period alongside your own reinstatement estimate, the sum insured basis and figure quoted verbatim, the trends clause quoted verbatim with your own reading of it, and every gap you could not resolve from the documents you hold. Codex returns the trigger register, the indemnity period gap calculation, the sum insured basis record, the trends clause record, a checklist translating the test case onto your wording, and a gaps file naming every cell nobody filled in. Codex decides nothing and estimates nothing.

10. **Translate the test case into a checklist for this wording, not a guarantee, and turn every unresolved line into a dated question for the broker.** The FCA's own page on the test case states the limit of what was decided in plain terms: "the judgment does not determine how much is payable under individual policies, but provides the basis for doing so," and the judgment "is legally binding on the eight insurers that agreed to be parties to the test case." It confirmed that certain clause types, disease clauses and denial or prevention of access clauses, are capable of responding to a covered event and forced insurers to reassess claims against that reading. It did not decide that your wording contains one of those clause types, that your radius covers a given case, or that a future flood or supplier failure is covered at all: those are read from your own document, not borrowed from a headline. Every clause marked not stated, every exclusion whose scope is unclear, and every gap between the indemnity period and a real reinstatement estimate becomes a numbered question, addressed to your broker by name, with the period of insurance end date in the footer.

## Then it checks

1. Every trigger clause named on the schedule's list of sections has a row in the trigger register, marked present, absent or not stated by clause type, and no row is marked present from a section heading alone.
2. Where a disease or denial or prevention of access clause is present, its radius or proximity wording, its definition of occurrence, and any exclusion sitting behind it are all quoted verbatim with the clause number, or the file states plainly that the wording gives none.
3. The indemnity period shown is the figure printed on the schedule, it is compared against a reinstatement estimate the owner has actually supplied with its source named, and the file states the gap in months or states that no estimate was supplied.
4. The sum insured basis is recorded as exactly one of gross profit, gross revenue or increased cost of working, quoted from the wording, and the file states plainly that the adequacy of the figure is checked by the under-insurance skill and not here.
5. The trends clause is quoted verbatim and the file records whether it could be read to exclude circumstances sharing a cause with the insured peril, which the Supreme Court held it must not do.
6. Every unresolved line becomes a numbered, dated question addressed to the broker, and none is answered by assuming the test case decided it.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never state a benchmark indemnity period, sum insured, gross profit figure or claim value for a single independent UK hospitality business. No such published figure exists, the ranges that circulate come from firms selling the next policy or the next valuation, and an owner who prices against a borrowed figure finds out it was wrong on the one day it mattered.
- Never recommend an insurer, a broker, a product or a policy wording, and never say one is better than another.
- Never tell the owner what indemnity period or sum insured basis to choose. The skill reads what is on the schedule and what the wording says about it. Choosing the figure is the owner's decision with their broker.
- Never mark a trigger clause covered because the FCA v Arch test case exists or because a headline says business interruption claims are being paid. The test case confirmed that certain clause types are capable of responding to a covered event. It is not a finding about this wording, this radius or any future event, and treating it as one is the exact mistake this skill exists to prevent.
- Never re-run the under-insurance skill's work inside this one. The sum insured basis is recorded here; whether the figure is adequate, the average clause, and the pro rata reduction belong to that skill, and running the check twice risks two different answers to the same question.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own policy wording, and for their own FCA authorised insurance broker to confirm before a renewal is agreed or a claim is made. It applies published rules and a published judgment to documents the owner supplied. It is not advice on which policy to buy, it is not a coverage determination, and it is not a substitute for reading the wording with the broker who arranged it.

## Built from
- The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Press Summary, "The Financial Conduct Authority (Appellant) v Arch Insurance (UK) Ltd and others (Respondents) and connected appeals" [2021] UKSC 1, https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2020_0177_press_summary_c80993737e.pdf, dated 15 January 2021 on the document, read 23 September 2026: the disease clause exemplar and occurrence test in step 2, the prevention of access and hybrid clause reasoning in step 3, the trends clause finding in step 8, and the description of what the test case decided in step 10.
- The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, case record for UKSC/2020/0177, https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2020-0177.html, judgment dated 15 January 2021, read 23 September 2026: the list of issues determined and the document links used to source the press summary and full judgment in steps 1 to 3 and 8.
- Financial Conduct Authority, "Business interruption insurance test case: Finalised guidance for firms", https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/finalised-guidance/finalised-guidance-bi-test-case.pdf, dated June 2020 on the document, read 23 September 2026: the definition of a relevant coverage clause in step 1, and the worked exclusion example in step 4.
- Financial Conduct Authority, "Business interruption insurance", https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/business-interruption-insurance, first published 10/05/2020, last updated 15/07/2026 as the page states, read 23 September 2026: the statement of what the judgment does and does not determine, and which insurers it binds, used in step 10.
- Financial Conduct Authority, press release, "Supreme Court judgment in FCA's business interruption insurance test case", https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/supreme-court-judgment-business-interruption-insurance-test-case, dated 15 January 2021, read 23 September 2026: background confirming the judgment date and its substantial allowance of the FCA's appeal, referenced in step 10.
- Alan Boswell Group, "Indemnity periods in business interruption insurance, what do you need to know?", https://www.alanboswell.com/resources/how-to-calculate-indemnity-period-for-business-interruption-insurance/, dated 23 December 2025, read 23 September 2026: broker commentary, not a regulator source, used in step 5 for the maximum indemnity period mechanism and in step 6 for the shape of the reinstatement gap.
- Konsileo, "Common Business Interruption Policy Extensions", https://konsileo.com/common-business-interruption-policy-extensions/, dated 7 April 2020, read 23 September 2026: broker commentary, not a regulator source, used in step 1 to describe the supplier, customer and utility extension categories in plain terms before the owner reads their own wording.

# business-interruption

## You are given
The business interruption section of one UK hospitality business's commercial combined or property policy: the schedule, the full policy wording, any endorsements, and the certificate of insurance where one exists, each with the version or edition of the wording and the period of insurance start and end dates. For every trigger clause the owner has found while reading the wording, its type marked by the owner as exactly one of `disease clause`, `denial of access clause`, `prevention of access clause`, `hybrid clause`, `utility failure clause`, `murder or suicide clause`, `supplier or customer premises clause` or `other named peril`, together with the clause name and number as printed, the clause wording copied out verbatim, any radius or proximity distance stated, the wording's own definition of occurrence if it gives one, and any exclusion or condition the owner has identified as sitting behind it, with the whole clause marked `present`, `absent` or `not stated` by the owner from reading the actual document. The indemnity period printed on the schedule, in months. The owner's own estimate of a realistic reinstatement time in months, with the basis of that estimate named. The sum insured basis as printed in the wording, marked by the owner as exactly one of `gross profit`, `gross revenue`, `increased cost of working` or `not stated`, with the wording copied verbatim and the sum insured figure copied from the schedule with its date. The trends clause wording copied out verbatim in full, and the owner's own recorded answer, reached from reading it against the wording's insuring clause, to whether it could be read to exclude circumstances arising from the same underlying cause as the insured peril. Every gap the owner could not resolve from the documents supplied. All judgement calls, including which clauses are present, what a radius or an exclusion means for this business, the reinstatement estimate, the sum insured basis and the trends clause reading, have already been made by the owner and are supplied to you.

## Produce
Write into a `./business-interruption-output/` folder:

1. `triggers.csv` with these columns in this order: `trigger_ref`, `clause_type`, `clause_name_verbatim`, `clause_number`, `present_in_wording`, `radius_or_proximity_wording_verbatim`, `occurrence_definition_verbatim`, `exclusion_or_condition_verbatim`, `source_document`, `policy_period_start`, `policy_period_end`. `clause_type` is exactly one of `disease clause`, `denial of access clause`, `prevention of access clause`, `hybrid clause`, `utility failure clause`, `murder or suicide clause`, `supplier or customer premises clause`, `other named peril`. `present_in_wording` is exactly one of `yes`, `no`, `not stated`. `trigger_ref` is T001 upward, one row per clause the owner has recorded. Every row where `present_in_wording` is `not stated` is listed in `gaps.md`.
2. `indemnity-period-check.csv` with columns: `schedule_indemnity_period_months`, `reinstatement_estimate_months`, `estimate_basis`, `gap_months`, `gap_exists`. `estimate_basis` is exactly one of `builder's estimate`, `quotation`, `professional valuation`, `no document supplied`. `gap_months` is `reinstatement_estimate_months` minus `schedule_indemnity_period_months`, calculated only where both figures are supplied, otherwise left empty. `gap_exists` is `yes` only where `gap_months` is a positive number, `no` where it is zero or negative, and left empty where `gap_months` is empty. Where `estimate_basis` is `no document supplied`, this row is listed in `gaps.md`.
3. `sum-insured-basis.csv` with columns: `sum_insured_basis`, `clause_wording_verbatim`, `sum_insured_amount_gbp`, `sum_insured_set_date`, `indemnity_period_months`, `cross_reference_note`. `sum_insured_basis` is exactly one of `gross profit`, `gross revenue`, `increased cost of working`, `not stated`. `sum_insured_amount_gbp` is copied only from a supplied schedule figure and is never estimated; leave it empty if none was supplied. `cross_reference_note` is always the fixed text: `sum insured adequacy is checked by the under-insurance skill, not here`.
4. `trends-clause-check.csv` with columns: `clause_wording_verbatim`, `adjustment_basis_named_in_wording`, `owners_reading_excludes_same_cause`, `note_field`. `adjustment_basis_named_in_wording` is `yes` or `no`, recording only whether the clause states a method, never Codex's own view of it. `owners_reading_excludes_same_cause` is exactly one of `yes`, `no`, `not stated`, copied exactly from the owner's supplied answer. `note_field` is always the fixed text: `the Supreme Court held in FCA v Arch [2021] UKSC 1 that a trends clause should not be construed so as to take away cover provided by the insuring clauses`.
5. `sc-test-case-checklist.md` recording, on separate lines and nothing else: whether `triggers.csv` contains a row marked `present` for `disease clause`, `denial of access clause`, `prevention of access clause` or `hybrid clause`, listed by clause type; for each such row, the radius or proximity wording recorded, or the words `no radius wording recorded`; for each such row, the exclusion or condition wording recorded, or the words `no exclusion recorded`; and the fixed closing line: `the FCA v Arch Insurance test case confirmed these clause types are capable of responding to a covered event, it did not decide that this wording responds to any future event, and only the owner's broker or a court can decide that.`
6. `gaps.md` a numbered list of: every row in `triggers.csv` where `present_in_wording` is `not stated`; the row in `indemnity-period-check.csv` where `estimate_basis` is `no document supplied`; every row in `sum-insured-basis.csv` where `sum_insured_basis` is `not stated` or `sum_insured_amount_gbp` is empty; every row in `trends-clause-check.csv` where `owners_reading_excludes_same_cause` is `not stated`; and any figure supplied without a policy period date or a schedule date.

## Rules
- Codex extracts, sorts, copies and computes `gap_months` by subtraction. It never decides whether a clause is present, never interprets an exclusion, never sets an indemnity period, a sum insured figure or a reinstatement estimate, and never forms its own reading of a trends clause. Every one of those was supplied by the owner.
- Never estimate a reinstatement time, a sum insured figure or a gross profit figure. A missing figure is an empty cell and a line in `gaps.md`, never a guess.
- Never mark a trigger clause `present` from a section heading, a policy summary, or the existence of the FCA v Arch test case. Only the owner's own verbatim-sourced marking supports `yes`.
- Never write a benchmark indemnity period, a typical sum insured, a typical claim value or an industry average gap into any file. No such figure exists for a single independent UK business and none is to be recorded.
- Never carry a clause, an indemnity period, a sum insured figure or a trends clause reading forward from a previous review. Wordings are reissued and endorsed at renewal, and last year's file may not describe this year's policy.
- Use British English, GBP written as `GBP` or the pound sign, and DD Month YYYY dates. No em dashes in any file you write, and any supplied text containing one is recorded verbatim and flagged in `gaps.md`.
- Every quoted clause, exclusion and condition is copied exactly, including its punctuation and capitalisation.
- Every file ends with this line: this is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own policy wording, and for their own FCA authorised insurance broker to confirm before a renewal is agreed or a claim is made. It applies supplied readings to a business interruption section and is not a coverage determination.

## Return
The absolute path of every file written, the row count of each CSV, the count of trigger clauses marked `yes`, `no` and `not stated` by clause type, the indemnity period gap in months and whether a gap exists, the sum insured basis recorded or the word `not stated`, the owner's trends clause reading, the list of clause types marked `present` in `sc-test-case-checklist.md`, and the `gaps.md` item count.