The insurance question nobody asks a roofer until it's too late

Nobody thinks about roof insurance until a tile comes off in a storm, or a "quick patch" from eighteen months ago starts leaking into the bedroom ceiling. By then, the question that actually matters — was this work backed by anything? — is the one nobody asked at the time.

A recognised roofer isn't just someone with a ladder and a van. Trade-body membership (bodies like the NFRC in the UK) usually means insurance-backed guarantees: if the roofer disappears, goes out of business, or the work fails outside of what a normal guarantee covers, there's still a path to getting it fixed. A cash-in-hand job with no paperwork has none of that. If it fails, the cost of putting it right lands entirely on you, on top of what you already paid.

This matters more on a roof than almost anywhere else in a property, because roofing failures are rarely obvious immediately. Water finds the weakest point and travels before it shows itself as a stain. By the time you can see the problem, it's usually been running for weeks.

None of this means every recognised professional is automatically better than every independent tradesperson — plenty of excellent roofers work solo with no formal accreditation. What it means is that the paperwork is the part you can actually check before the work starts, when it's still useful. Ask what happens if something goes wrong six months later. If the answer is vague, that's the answer.