What to ask before hiring an office removals company
Before you sign anything, get straight answers to these seven questions:
What’s the insurance limit on your goods in transit and public liability cover – and does it match the replacement value of your IT and furniture?
Who’s actually doing the work – in-house crew or subcontractors, and how are they vetted?
How is IT and data handled during transit, from server disconnection to secure destruction of old drives?
Can they move you with zero, or near-zero, downtime – evenings, weekends, phased moves?
Who’s responsible for dilapidations and disposing of the furniture and kit you’re leaving behind?
What happens if you need to cancel or reschedule – and what’s actually in the small print?
What do they do with waste, packaging, and old assets – landfill, or something better?
Ask these seven before you ask for a quote. A good commercial mover will answer all of them without hesitation, in writing, before you sign. If they can’t, that’s your answer too.
We’ve run 400+ office relocations across the UK, and every one of the moves that went wrong on someone else’s watch traces back to one of these questions never being asked. This guide gives you the exact wording to use, what a solid answer sounds like, and what should make you walk away.
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1. What are your insurance coverage limits for our commercial contents?
This is the question that matters most and gets asked least.
Ask specifically for:
Goods-in-transit insurance – and the maximum claim value it covers, not just that it “exists.”
Public liability insurance – typically £2 million to £10 million for commercial movers, covering damage to the building itself, not just your belongings.
Employer’s liability insurance – a legal requirement in the UK if the firm has staff, currently a minimum of £5 million.
A copy of the certificate, not a verbal assurance. Any reputable firm sends this without being chased.
Here’s the catch most businesses miss: standard goods-in-transit policies often cap the payout per item or per load. If you’re moving a server room worth £150,000, a policy capped at £50,000 leaves you exposed on exactly the assets you can least afford to lose.
Get the limit in writing and check it against your own asset register before the move, not after something’s damaged.
We carry full insurance cover on every move regardless of scale – from a 10-desk startup relocation to a multi-floor office fit-out – precisely because “mostly covered” isn’t good enough when it’s someone else’s business on the line.
2. How do you vet subcontractors, and will they be on-site during our move?
Ask this one directly: “Is the crew arriving on moving day employed by you, or subcontracted?”
It’s a fair question, and it’s not one every mover wants to answer honestly.
Subcontracting itself isn’t a red flag – plenty of legitimate firms scale up with trusted subcontractor crews for larger jobs. The problem is when a firm can’t tell you:
Who’s actually turning up
Whether that crew is DBS-checked or background-vetted
Whether the subcontractor is covered under the same insurance policy, or a separate one with different limits
If subcontractors are involved, ask for their insurance certificates too – a gap between the main contractor’s cover and the subcontractor’s cover is where liability disputes actually happen.
This overlaps heavily with general vetting, and if you want the fuller picture, how to spot the red flags when choosing a removals company covers the questions that separate a properly run operation from someone with a van and a Facebook page.
3. How do you handle IT equipment and data security during the move?
For most offices, this is the highest-risk part of the entire relocation – not the furniture.
A mover that takes this seriously should be able to explain:
How servers, network equipment, and phone systems are packed, labelled, and reconnected
Chain-of-custody procedures for laptops and drives that travel with the crew rather than staff
What happens to decommissioned devices – hard drives, old servers, printers with stored data
Here’s the part most businesses don’t realise: under UK GDPR, you remain the data controller even when a third party physically handles or destroys the hardware. If a laptop full of client data goes missing in transit, the liability sits with your business, not the removals firm, unless your contract says otherwise.
Ask for a documented destruction certificate for anything wiped or scrapped during the move. The ICO’s guidance on data security sets out what a defensible process actually looks like – it’s worth reading before you finalise your move contract, not after an incident.
4. Can you schedule the move to minimise our downtime?
Ask for a specific plan, not a promise. “We’ll fit around you” isn’t an answer – a proposed timeline is.
What a downtime-conscious mover offers:
Evening or weekend moves so Monday starts with a working office, not a building site
Phased relocation for larger teams – moving department by department rather than everyone at once
A realistic estimate of how many hours the physical move takes, based on desk count and access at both sites
Flexibility around building access windows – loading bay hours, lift booking slots, permit requirements for London sites in particular
If you’re relocating within the capital, congestion zones, loading restrictions, and building access rules all shape the timeline – a mover experienced in office removals in London will factor these in from the first quote rather than discovering them on the day.
We cover commercial relocation services across the UK too, and the same principle holds everywhere: the mover should be building the schedule around your operational hours, not the other way round. For the internal side of minimising downtime – your own move-day plan – our full office relocation checklist walks through the 10 steps that keep Monday morning clean.
5. Who’s responsible for dilapidations and disposing of assets we’re leaving behind?
Get this in writing before moving day, not after you’ve handed back the keys.
Two separate things need clarifying:
Dilapidations – making good any damage to the old space before handover. Some movers include basic protection (door frame padding, carpet protection) as standard; others charge extra. Ask which applies, and photograph the empty space yourselves regardless – it protects your deposit either way.
Asset disposal – old furniture, monitors, and cabling nobody’s used in years always surfaces during a move. Ask specifically:
Do they handle disposal, or is that on you?
Where does surplus furniture actually go – landfill, or donation/resale?
Is WEEE-compliant recycling included for old electricals, or billed separately?
A firm that can’t answer where your old furniture ends up usually hasn’t thought about it – which tells you something about how the rest of the move will be run too.
6. What are your cancellation and rescheduling terms?
Office moves slip. Lease completions get delayed, fit-out contractors overrun, and sometimes the new building just isn’t ready. Ask this question before you need the answer.
Get clarity on:
Notice period required to reschedule without a fee
Cancellation charges – a flat fee, a percentage, or nothing within a set window
What happens if they need to reschedule you – do you get priority rebooking, or does your move date just disappear into their queue?
Commercial contracts in the UK don’t carry the same statutory cancellation rights as consumer contracts – there’s no automatic 14-day cooling-off period once you’ve signed a business-to-business agreement. Terms are whatever’s written down, which is exactly why it’s worth reading the government’s model terms and conditions for contracts before you agree anything bespoke, and pushing back on any clause that feels one-sided.
If a quote arrives with no cancellation terms mentioned at all, ask for them explicitly. Silence on this point almost always means the terms favour the mover, not you.
7. What are your sustainability practices?
More procurement teams are asking this now, and rightly so – office moves generate a lot of waste by default: skips of old furniture, packaging, and electricals that could easily have been reused.
Worth asking:
What happens to furniture you’re not taking with you – landfill, donation, or resale?
Do they use reusable crates instead of single-use cardboard where possible?
Is there any measurable environmental commitment behind the claim, or is it just a line on the website?
On a typical 50-desk office relocation, roughly a third of the furniture doesn’t make the trip to the new site. Where it ends up is a genuine choice, not an afterthought – and it’s one reason why an eco-friendly moving company matters beyond the marketing language.
We’ve helped plant over 100 trees through move-related carbon offsetting to date, and it’s a habit we’d recommend asking any mover about directly – not because it’s a nice-to-have, but because it tells you whether sustainability is built into how they operate or just how they advertise.
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Red flags: warning signs to walk away from
If you hear any of these during a quote call, treat it as a signal to look elsewhere:
“Don’t worry about the insurance certificate, we’re covered.” – with no document offered.
Vague answers about who’s on the crew – no clarity on employed staff versus subcontractors.
No mention of data security or IT handling unless you raise it first.
A single fixed slot with no flexibility – no evening, weekend, or phased options offered.
No written cancellation terms in the quote or contract.
“We’ll sort the old furniture” with no detail on where it actually goes.
Pressure to sign same-day without time to check references or insurance documents.
Frequently asked questions
What questions should I ask an office removals company before booking?
Ask about insurance limits, subcontractor use, IT and data handling, downtime scheduling, dilapidations and asset disposal, cancellation terms, and sustainability practices. A mover that answers all seven clearly, in writing, is worth trusting with the job.
How much insurance should a commercial mover carry?
Most reputable commercial movers carry public liability cover between £2 million and £10 million, plus goods-in-transit insurance sized to the value of what’s being moved. Always ask for the certificate and check the per-item or per-load cap, not just the headline figure.
Is it safe to let a removals company handle old IT equipment and data?
Only if there’s a documented process. You remain the data controller under UK GDPR even when a third party destroys the hardware, so ask for a destruction certificate for anything wiped or scrapped, and check the mover’s process against the ICO’s guidance on data security.
Do office removals companies typically use subcontractors?
Many do, especially for larger jobs, and it’s not automatically a problem. The issue is transparency – ask whether the crew is employed or subcontracted, and confirm the subcontractor is covered by the same or equivalent insurance.
Can an office move really happen with no downtime?
Close to none, in most cases. Evening or weekend moves, combined with a properly planned IT cutover, typically limit disruption to well under a day. Ask for a specific schedule proposal rather than a general promise before you book.
What happens to old office furniture during a relocation?
It should be sorted into what’s moving, what’s being donated, what’s recycled, and what’s resold – not simply skipped. Ask your mover directly where surplus furniture ends up; it’s one of the clearest tells of how the rest of the move will be handled.
If you want to put these questions to someone, EcoGreen Movers answers all seven in writing as part of a commercial quote.
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