Just as an example .... say, for instance, you want to hire a hall for a coffee morning - an innocuous enough activity. You decide to hire from a local authority. They might well want to to have PLI because something could happen at the coffee morning - ie if the volunteers happened to be momentarily distracted and a child got a hand on the handle of the urn, they could be scalded. Or someone had an allergic reaction to 'hidden' nuts in some cake or other ...

if it went to court and the actual organisers / hirers didn't have PLI / any money, but it was decided that damages were payable / someone was liable, it is quite pssible that the courts would transfer liability to the people who owned and hired out the venue, rather than the people who hired it.

That's what we have been told at our risk assessment training, anyway.