Recenlty I received an email from Paula Burns who works in the insurance industry. She wrote the following about insurance rates and security teams:
Regarding lowering insurance rates, as a result of having a trained safety team, this is a question that has several answers to it. We may want to discuss this further when you have a minute, in the meantime I've tried to answer it below:
Insurance agents have to "sell to both sides". We meet with the client and review their loss control procedures and account as a whole. After this meeting, the agent should determine if this would be a good account to insure and / or if not, is the client willing to implement the policies and procedures that it would take to reduce, contractually transfer, or avoid risk.
If the church is one that is a good risk to insure, or is willing to work to become a good risk to insure, then the agent presents these facts to the insurance company. When it comes to a trained security team, I would love to see that in place because it displays that the church is being proactive. A church that is being proactive on security/loss control issues is going to most likely get better rating on the liability side than one that is not. On the property side, you can get credits for having monitored security systems in place, sprinklers, etc. However, on the liability side it is more discretionary in nature. It then becomes the job of the agent to convince underwriting they need to give the best rating they can. You have to sell it not only to the client but point out the security training to the insurer. Make sure that the agent who is presenting the church to the insurance market is providing a good Narrative highlighting all the proactive measures that have been put in place. If the agent is not doing this then you may not be able to get the full credit or best pricing available on the liability pricing side.
It may be that you do not get any credit, but higher limits of liability are available when this is pointed out to the insurer. I have an example of this. One of the markets we represent will not include sexual abuse in the Umbrella Liability policy unless the church has good policies and training in place to reduce this risk. If they do, then they will sublimit an extra million in limit for the church. This makes $2,000,000 available instead of $1,000,000. This can be a huge difference in the event of a loss.