Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
The words "warranty" and "condition" carry real weight in an insurance policy, and getting them wrong can decide whether a claim is paid. Here is how the law works, and where your kitchen extract cleaning fits in.
Insurance law
A commercial kitchen policy is full of small print that sounds interchangeable - warranties, conditions, conditions precedent - but in law these words do very different jobs, and the difference can decide whether a fire claim is paid in full or refused outright.
If you run a busy kitchen, you have almost certainly agreed to a cleaning term without reading the legal machinery behind it. Most policies now require the extract system to be cleaned to a recognised standard at set intervals, with records kept. That single clause sits inside a framework of insurance law that changed significantly in recent years, mostly in the policyholder's favour. Understanding how warranties and conditions actually operate helps you see why documented, standards-based cleaning is not box-ticking - it is the thing that keeps your cover live when you need it most.
For most of the last century, a warranty in an insurance contract was a brutal thing. If you breached it - even trivially, even in a way that had nothing to do with the eventual loss - the insurer was automatically discharged from all liability from the moment of breach. A policy could be lost over a technicality that never came near the actual fire.
The Insurance Act 2015 rebalanced this for business insurance. Under the Act, a breach of warranty no longer voids the policy. Instead, cover is suspended for the period you are in breach, and it revives automatically once you put the breach right. So if a cleaning warranty lapses because a scheduled clean is overdue, and you then complete the clean before any loss occurs, the insurer cannot rely on that earlier gap to escape a later, unconnected claim. The remedy became proportionate rather than punitive.
The Act also swept away "basis of the contract" clauses. These used to convert every answer on a proposal form into a warranty, so any innocent inaccuracy could destroy the whole policy. That trap is now abolished for business cover, and it cannot be reinstated by clever drafting.
Crucially, the Act draws a line between different kinds of term. A true warranty is a promise about the state of affairs that must hold throughout the policy - for example, that the extract system is cleaned at defined intervals. A condition precedent to liability is a term that must be satisfied before the insurer is obliged to pay a particular claim. A bare condition is a lesser obligation whose breach may sound only in damages. Insurers do not always label these clearly, and the label they choose is not always the one a court accepts. What matters is the substance of the wording and its effect.
The numbers behind the clause
Where a policy ties cover to kitchen extract cleaning, it is almost always pointing at TR19® Grease - the fire-risk specification published by the Building Engineering Services Association. These are the figures your insurer's wording is built on.
TR19® Grease sets lighter intervals for lighter use - broadly every six months for moderate use of 6 to 12 hours a day, and every twelve months for light use of 2 to 6 hours a day. It also expects the work to be verified, with post-clean measurement, and increasingly expects the technician to hold the BESA Grease Hygiene Technician qualification. A policy condition that says "clean to TR19" is really importing all of this detail by reference.
Put the law and the standard together and a practical picture emerges. If your policy makes TR19® Grease cleaning a warranty or a condition precedent, and you cannot show it was met, the insurer has a route to challenge a claim - and grease fires in ductwork are exactly the loss these terms are written to guard against. The point often turns on whether you have the evidence, not just the good intentions.
There is, however, an important protection for you in the Act. A term is caught by the rule on terms not relevant to the actual loss if complying with it would tend to reduce the risk of a particular kind of loss, or loss at a particular place or time. Where that applies, the insurer cannot refuse the claim for non-compliance if you can show the breach could not have increased the risk of the loss that actually happened, in the circumstances in which it happened. In plain terms - if a lapse in your cleaning records genuinely had no bearing on the fire, you have a statutory argument that the claim should still be paid. The catch is that grease build-up in an extract system is precisely the kind of thing that does raise fire risk, so this defence is hard to run when the loss is a duct fire and the cleaning was overdue.
That is why the safest position is simply to keep the term satisfied and to be able to prove it. In practice that means treating your cleaning regime as evidence, not just maintenance:
It is also worth reading your own schedule closely, or having a broker do it. Check whether the cleaning term is described as a warranty or a condition precedent, what interval it demands, whether it names a standard, and whether it requires you to use a suitably qualified contractor. If the wording is stricter than TR19® Grease would require, the policy wins - insurers can and do impose their own frequencies. Two related reads worth your time are the mistakes in the insurance cover most food businesses get wrong and the specifics of what voids commercial kitchen insurance, both of which sit alongside this one.
Questions
Not for business cover under the Insurance Act 2015. A breach now suspends cover for the period you are in breach rather than cancelling the policy outright. If you put the breach right - for example by completing an overdue clean - cover revives, and the insurer cannot rely on the earlier gap to refuse a later, unconnected claim.
A warranty is a continuing promise about a state of affairs that must hold throughout the policy, such as cleaning the extract system at set intervals. A condition precedent is a term that must be satisfied before the insurer has to pay a particular claim. Insurers do not always label these clearly, and a court looks at the substance of the wording rather than the name given to it.
The Act says an insurer cannot rely on non-compliance with a risk-reducing term if you can show the breach could not have increased the risk of the loss that actually occurred. In principle that protects you where a records gap had no bearing on the fire. In practice it is hard to run when the loss is a grease fire in the ductwork, because overdue cleaning is exactly the kind of thing that raises that risk.
Most policies point to TR19 Grease, which sets minimum intervals by usage: roughly every three months for heavy use of 12 to 16 hours a day, every six months for moderate use, and every twelve months for light use. Grease deposits should not exceed a mean of around 200 microns between cleans. Your insurer can impose stricter frequencies, so always check your own schedule.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.