Final call for former Scottish Life members to claim payments

Scottish Life is making a last call for former members to get in touch if they had an eligible policy at the time of the company’s demutualisation in 2001, as they may be entitled to a payment of £500 for loss of membership.

In accordance with the scheme particulars set out at the time, such compensation payments must be finalised by 1 July 2007, six years after the date of demutualisation. After this time, there will be no entitlement for compensation payments for loss of membership.

A web-based service at scottishlife.co.uk/slmembership has been set up to deal with enquiries.

There are currently around 15,000 former members of Scottish Life who are still eligible for compensation, representing a total amount of unclaimed payments of approximately £7.5 million.

Following the demutualisation, Royal London put in place a robust three stage tracing procedure for tracking down former Scottish Life members who had not responded to earlier multiple mailings:

in the first instance, members were traced via banks, building societies and IFAs.

the second stage involved an exercise conducted through the Department for Work and Pensions, using their database.

finally, Scottish Life worked with an external specialist tracing agency from August 2004 to March 2006 and, for this purpose, subscribed annually to the Unclaimed Asset Register, utilising this to find previously untraced members.

Alasdair Buchanan, Head of Communications at Scottish Life, commented: “From the time of demutualisation, we’ve been determined to do everything within our power to ensure former Scottish Life members received any compensation due to them, but we are now approaching the end of the claim period set out in the scheme particulars. During this time we conducted an extremely thorough tracing exercise to identify those people we had not been able to contact through the usual channels. As a result of our initial mailings and these subsequent efforts, we’ve been able to find over 210,000 members already and make payments to them totalling more than £105 million.

“In line with the legal procedure established at the time of demutualisation, we are now approaching the final deadline of 1 July 2007 for claims. We are therefore making a final call for people to contact us if they think they may be entitled to a payment for loss of membership. If their details are on the list of people who are due payment, we will take the necessary steps to process their claim.

“Any money which isn’t paid to former members by 1 July 2007 will remain in the Scottish Life Fund for the benefit of those people who have policies in the Fund.”