It is "almost essential" for firms to be insured to protect the building they work in and their assets.

This is the opinion of one industry practitioner, who went on to say that business interruption insurance would also help to "protect the balance sheet".

According to Steve Foulsham, technical services manager at the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA), the building from which a firm operates, as well as its contents and the company’s stock "should clearly be covered by insurance".

He went on to recommend: "If products that a business is supplying, distributing or manufacturing cause injury or damage to a third party then the firm could be legally liable, so they should get products liability to protect against that."

Figures produced earlier this year by Nationwide suggested that one in five people in the UK did not have any form of building insurance in January 2008.