Need for financial protection has never been greater

Scottish Widows paid out a total of over £120 million for 3,703 critical illness claims, between January 2000 and October 2006.

In the year up to October 2006 a total of over £25 million was paid out on 774 critical illness claims.

The top five causes of claim account for 95% of all critical illness claims that Scottish Widows paid. Cancer is the most common accounting for 61% of all claims. After cancer, the next most common causes of claim are:

Heart Disease
Stroke
Multiple sclerosis
Children’s cover

As you can see from the statistics above, Scottish Widows’ critical illness insurance also includes critical illness insurance for children. Although cancer in children is very rare, most of the children’s claims were for leukaemia.

Richard Jones, interim protection market director at Scottish Widows, said: “The need for financial protection has never been greater, yet lack of consumer confidence is contributing to people failing to invest in the valuable protection that they and their dependants need. “

Through publishing its claims history, Scottish Widows aims to illustrate that the majority of claims are paid, but also why some claims are declined. Of the claims received during the 12 months October 2005 to October 2006, 16% have been turned down – this compares with 18% turned down in the previous 12 month period to October 2005.

The two main reasons for claims being turned down are:

Non-disclosure of material information when the policy was taken out – 53%
The claim not meeting the policy definition – 43%

Richard Jones comments: “Through its work with the ABI and the Critical Illness Working Party, Scottish Widows has been working to address the issue of declined claims. To reduce non-disclosure, application forms have been improved to make them clearer for our customers. To reduce the incidence of a claim not meeting the policy definition, the industry has made real headway in improving the clarity of illness definitions - thus ensuring it is clearer to consumers about what is, and isn’t, covered. Although the benefits, i.e fewer declined claims, won’t be seen for a couple of years, these measures all go towards making each step of the process - from application to claim - clearer for consumers.”

Claims Panel

To support our claims process, and to make sure we are treating customers fairly, we have a Claims Panel. The panel reviews all provisionally declined borderline claims and all provisionally declined critical illness claims for children. The panel is independent of our usual Claims Team, with a selection of protection experts and non-experts. The Panel reviews cases before a final decision is reached.