Abstract. A left ample semigroup is a semigroup with a unary operation + which has a (2, 1)-algebra embedding into a symmetric inverse monoid I(X), the operation + on I(X) being defined by α + = αα −1 . We consider some analogues for left ample semigroups of results on E-unitary covers of inverse semigroups due to McAlister and Reilly. The analogue of an E-unitary cover is a proper cover, and we discuss the construction of proper covers in terms of relational homomorphisms, and of dual prehomomorphisms. We observe that our construction gives an E-dense proper cover for an E-dense left ample semigroup. We also consider proper covers constructed from strict embeddings into factorisable left ample monoids. In contrast to the inverse case, not all proper covers arise in this way. However, in the E-dense case, we characterise those E-dense proper covers which can be constructed from such embeddings.