Information before you commence

Before you commence this survey, we would like to explain briefly what the survey is about, how the survey is structured and how we conduct this survey ethically.
What is this survey about?

This survey is about Professional Indemnity Insurance (referred to in this survey as PI insurance or PII). It is a survey for consulting services businesses in the Australian Construction Sector such as Architects, Building Designers, Landscape Architects, Engineers, Project Managers, and Quantity Surveyors.

The survey is being undertaken to better understand he current market, and means and conditions through which construction sector consultancy services are obtaining professional indemnity insurance.

The survey is also seeking to understand some of the conditions of risk and the circumstances and impacts of claims when they occur.

The information gathered in this survey will be used to provide a report to ACIF members. The report, subject to the ACIF Board approval, will be a publicly accessible document published on the ACIF website and available for ACIF members to distribute to their members. It will be used to hold discussions with stakeholders to these issues including:
  • insurance costs,
  • claims excesses,
  • cover exemptions
  • the real extent to which residual risk is covered by policies when claims occur
  • disproportionate risk allocation in consultancy agreements

With many governments reviewing procurement policies and alongside the Building Reforms underway at different timeframes around the country, the report from this survey will help to take conversations from relying upon anecdote, individual stories and third party accounts to a more objective quantifiable evidence-based understanding of the issues at hand. Such evidence provides much greater veracity for any discussions of an advocacy nature in respect of regulation, and practices in both the construction and insurance markets.

Information gained from this survey can enable us to advocate to stakeholders such as government, the legal services and insurances services and development sectors for strategies to prevent risk or improve the way residual risk is managed.

Part A of this survey asks information about the scale and nature of your consulting services business, how you obtain your PI insurance, its cost and de-risking your services in consultancy agreements.

Part B seeks information about a PI insurance claim you may have made and settled over the past three years.

Most questions only involve closed ended or short text responses. Please note that any response seeking information about amounts of money refer to $AU inclusive of GST (except where ex GST amount is requested).

We estimate it will take between 20  minutes to complete both parts depending on the number of case studies.

The survey will be open for two months from November 1st 2021 and closes on Friday December 31st
General survey undertaking, your participation and privacy.

The Australian Institute of Architects (the Institute)is carrying out the survey on behalf of the ACIF Board (as a pro bono undertaking) using their subscription Survey Monkey Account. The information will be analysed and reported by the Institute’s Policy and Advocacy personnel with extensive experience in carrying out sensitive research and research ethics.
The survey is anonymous. We ask you not to provide any names of people, projects, or parties in any of the responses that you provide.

As a further safeguard any potentially identifying information that you may include in your answers will be 'anonymised' or deidentified in the findings report. Once data has been cleaned and checked for duplicate responses, IP addresses will be removed from the exported data.

Once the data has been exported from Survey Monkey, it will be deleted from that environment. The data will be held for five years by the Institute before being destroyed.
There is no specific individual advantage or disadvantage for you or your business that we forecast in completing the survey apart from an estimated twenty minutes of your time (according to the depth of your responses) if both parts are completed.

We are seeking information about recent (past three years) PI claims. If you think this may cause you distress, then you have an option not complete that section of the survey.

While there is no predicted individual benefit for your business from undertaking this survey, you or your business would be contributing to a body of evidence that can be used to advocate to stakeholders such as government, the legal sector or the insurance sector for changes to strengthen insurance and reduce risk.

Your participation is entirely voluntary. You may choose to complete all or part of the survey. However once you have completed the survey we will not be able to remove information as we are not collecting identifying information to permit us to identify and remove a survey record.

Other information.
If you have any queries of a general or technical nature about this survey, please email these to the Australian Construction Industry Forum via: info@acif.com.au

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