Practical Protection

Practical Protection

On Posted on by Practical Protection to podcast, Season 12, Uncategorized

Episode 1 – Underdisclosure

Hi, everybody, it’s the start of Season 12 and I’m focusing on underdisclosure in protection insurance. Also known as misrepresentation or non-disclosure, this is a situation that everyone wants to avoid. Underdisclosure might not change the terms of insurance, but, it can lead to prices or sum assureds changing, and in the worst case a policy being cancelled from inception.

The key takeaways:

  • Non-disclosure is seen as innocent, negligent or deliberate
  • It can be tricky sometimes to remember everything in your medical history that the insurer wants to know, so accessing your medical records before applying for cover can be a big help
  • Examples of insurance questions in protection insurance where we see underdisclosure

Alan will be back with me next time for a deep dive into a medical condition and how it’s underwritten for protection insurance. We are always happy to take your suggestions on what to cover so please feel free to fire over any areas that you would like us to go into.

Remember, if you are listening to this as part of your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on our website, thanks to our sponsors PlannerX.

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Kathryn Knowles 00:10

Hi everybody, we are on season 12, episode one. Can’t believe we’re already at 12 seasons, and coming up on six and a half years of the Practical Protection Podcast, which feels really, really crazy to me. There’s been such a huge amount of things happening in the last six and a half years. So, anyway, let’s get straight into it. Today, we are going to be starting off this season by talking about under disclosure when it comes to arranging protection insurance in the UK. This is the Practical Protection Podcast, so last time, end of season 11, I covered over disclosure, and now it’s time to do under disclosure. So, under disclosure is the thing that a lot of people tend to worry about. Naturally, it makes a lot of sense to be concerned about it, because you don’t want to do anything that would mean that the insurer can say, well, you didn’t tell us everything, which then has the flip side of the oath of disclosure. I do recommend listening in on that one, because that also has its own risks too.

But under disclosure basically means that you’ve not told the insurer everything that they needed to know to make a clear decision as to your circumstances and if they would offer you the insurance, and if so, what terms that would be, it is the kind of area of the undisclosure where it doesn’t always happen, but sometimes I still hear it from people that go, “Oh, insures will do anything to not pay out, will there? There’ll be something somewhere, and they won’t do this because it won’t make this, and it’s a case of, well, you know, some people, you know, if you feel that way, that is obviously the way that you feel, but most of the time you know discrepancies are ultimately they are discrepancies, and this is a contract. It’s a contract between you and the insurer, and what I like to say to people is essentially we’re looking at a snapshot of each other, so this is two people, one of them is a business, obviously, the insurer, but there’s two sides here taking a snapshot of each other and saying, I agree to enter into this contract with you.

I think sometimes people don’t realize, obviously, you know, obviously, essentially it is a contract, and you know, there are certain rules and laws around contracts and things like that, but they sent the insurer is looking at the applicants and saying right based upon your age now and your smoker status, your height, weight, all this information about your health, your travel, the activities you do, we think that you know we can offer you this insurance and it’ll cost this much and you decide yes or no if you want to take that, and then similarly the other way, you are looking at the insurer, and you’re looking at their key features document, which would come with the protection insurance, and saying, “Right, I’m looking at you now. You’ve said that you can offer me this policy, which does this, this, and this for this amount of time, and as long as I keep paying for it, it will pay out if xyz happens. Okay, I accept that, and we’re going to go ahead with that. So, just like the insurer, you know, the insurer can’t just end a policy without good reason. They have to have very, very good reason, which we will go through in terms of this under disclosure.

But basically, both sides mutually agree, as long as they can both fairly understand the contract that they are getting into, so you as a consumer need to be able to understand clearly what you’re getting into, which is why there’s these key features documents. Why there are people like brokers like myself who will explain the contracts to you and what you are not covered for. The insurer as well, also has the right to know that they have seen everything that they need to see in to be able to tough the insurance to you. So, going over a little bit again as to what we did last time, so we do have the Consumer Insurance Disclosure and Representations Act of 2012 which is often shortened to Cidra.

Kathryn Knowles 04:19

Now, this primarily was focused upon giving, I think, you know, sorry, really key protections to consumers, and it basically said that, you know, insurers could no longer work upon utmost good faith, you know, they couldn’t work on this thing of well, they should have told me this, or they should have told me that, and they didn’t, so we’re just going to not pay out, you know. The insurers could be farther, I’ve said that you should have volunteered material facts, even if they hadn’t asked about it. So, with Sidra, it very, very, very sort of like basic side of things, and they basically required insurers to go. Look at themselves and go right, if we want to know about XYZ, then we need a question in there to ask about it, because essentially, as well, the background to it was when there’s when the insurers were saying what you need to volunteer material facts, it’s a case of, well, who knows what material fact is, as a broker I would have a pretty good idea as to what the insurers would want to know, but your ordinary person on the street, who’s never worked in insurance or finance, who’s never even seen an insurance application before.

How did that, and that’s the question is in front of them. How are they possibly meant to know what a material factor is? And that was seen as being unfair, and obviously that’s why these things came into place, so it does say that obviously the insurers need to ask the right questions, you know, if they don’t ask about it, then that clearly means that they’re not concerned about it, but it also does, on the other side as well, mean that you, as a consumer, must provide a fair representation of yourself to the insurer, you need to answer the questions honestly and carefully, and to the best of your knowledge. So, basically, we don’t need to volunteer extra information, but we just need to make sure that we are giving the insurer a really good idea of that snapshot of our life, and that will include, obviously, even though I’m saying a snapshot, it’s like it’s a snapshot of most things up until that time. There are different times of different time frames, which I’ll go through in a little bit as well. But essentially, it was a big change in the industry, and a really, really welcome one as well, because you know, there were times when maybe people were signing up for things, not understanding the questions, and very innocently answering things incorrectly, but then that would have maybe led to claims not being covered, which obviously, no matter what, is going to have some negativity in terms of the how we perceive the insurance world.

On the other side as well, there are going to be people who would have actually deliberately not said the truth, so they could get the insurance on the hope that it would just pay out if at certain circumstances happens. I’m not saying that that’s obviously the majority of people, I think it is very, very much minority of people that would do that, but unfortunately there is that situation, so the there’s been positives for both sides, for the insurance and consumers, in terms of this change. So, especially with under disclosure, we’re really talking about what’s known as misrepresentation on non-disclosure, and there’s three main types, and you can look into a lot more. There’s the Association of British insurers, which is the ABI, they do have a document known as a non-disclosure and treating customers fairly claims for long-term protection insurance products document, which is pretty hefty, and you know you need to be in the right mindset to read something like that, but you know I’m going to give you a nice summary, so with some examples, so hopefully you don’t feel that the needle to sit down with that, with that PDF, which is is long and very insurance-wordy jargon, would be probably the right word. It’s written really, really well.

Kathryn Knowles 08:14

I’m not going to, I’m not doing the AMI or anything, but if you’re not into this kind of thing, and insurance doesn’t give you a buzz, it’s not exactly going to be the most thrilling of reads, so examples of where there would be what’s known as a non-disclosure, so that would be the first one, be innocence, so innocence is that for the wording, sort of like that a reasonable person, that’s kind of like the term that’s used, I’m not completely sure if I like the idea of the framing of a reasonable person, but I think it’s basically saying that somebody of sound mind who is able to answer these questions and understand them and to be able to give an answer accurately, this is sort of like what they would expect, that basically an innocent one would be is that it genuinely was innocent, the what you have told them or not told them wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome. I’ll give some examples of these very, very soon. We then have negligence, which isn’t actually the worst one, even though it does sound – I think the word negligent does make it sound like whoa there, but that is something where you should have known that you should have given a different answer, or it’s, it’s reasonable to assume that you should have been aware that your answer wasn’t completely accurate, and it would have changed the terms that the insurer would have offered, and what you tend to find with that situation is that the sum assured or the premium has changed, so I’ll give a very, very, very basic example, just because it’s easier for me with the numbers in my head, because I’m just doing this completely off the top of my head. So, let’s say somebody arranged 100,000 pounds of life insurance, and it cost them 15 pound per month now.

How it comes to life, maybe they’re reviewing the cover with a broker, and they tell the broker something from the past, and the broker looks and says, because he can tell I’m using this from experience, and we look at the old policy and go, okay, right, you’ve told me this information, so obviously amazing, thank you for letting me know that and making me aware, but I’m pretty certain that that means that that wasn’t included in your previous application. Key thing there is not to panic, not to worry, and because there’s usually a good resolution from it. It could also be that the questions that were asked in that application from however many years ago meant that that disclosure didn’t actually need to be in there the majority of the time. I think if you speak to a really established broker like myself, we would know pretty quickly if it should have been in the application or not. You know, when you’ve done this for what mile now? I am 15 years, I’m trying to think now. No, sick. Hang on a minute. Yes, 16 years I’ve been in the industry. Wow, that’s there’s a year there that’s just completely gone. Actually, I was gonna say that’s probably about six years or something that’s completely gone out of my head, right? Yes, I’ve been doing this a while, and you get really, really familiar with the question sets and what insurers would and wouldn’t know, and so. and this is something I’ve had happen with people for, so I’ll just say, you know, at that time I say, get me a copy of the application, let’s double check if it should have been in there or not, and then let’s speak to the insurer, and there is a number of different things that can happen from that, and so it could be a say that it’s maybe seen as innocence of the insurer says it doesn’t matter, or it might be that the good, you know, what actually technically that was negligent, but with so many years down the line, and this was so many years ago, that we’re actually just going to leave it as it is, because if you applied again now, you know, we would leave everything as it is, it’s.. I’m not saying it would happen that way, it’s.

Kathryn Knowles 12:00

I’ve experienced it before, it’s not the most common outcome, but it is a potential, but generally with negligent, they would turn and say, “Look, you really should have told us that, and you know this would have been different, so, so we’re going to do this. You applied for 100,000 you’ve had 100,000 at 15 pounds per month. Well, actually, if we’d been aware of this information, you’d have had 100,000 pounds, and it would have been 22 pounds per month. I’m making numbers up, by the way, but I’m giving a good general estimate of things. So either you can start paying 22 pounds per month and keep 100,000 pound, and actually, what you do need to do as well is make up that seven pound difference for each month that you’ve not paid the 22 pounds up to now, or what we can do is keep you at 15 pound, but let’s say they’ll, they’ll go right, but we’re going to drop the summer short to, I don’t know, 85 grand or something like that, so that can be a potential option when it’s negligent.

The other thing would be, and it’s been more obviously in the income protection space, and again, I’ll give a bit of an example of this in a bit, is that they might say, well, look, if you told us that, we would have given you the insurance, but there would have been an exclusion for claims relating, let’s, let’s say somebody had pulled a tendon in their right leg a couple of years ago, and so the intro, like, look, if you told us that, and we were aware of that, we would have actually excluded claims for your right leg, so you can keep your policy, but you’re not going to get cover for claims relating to that right leg, so some might do that again, if it was quite a while ago, then I said, you know what, it’s all that time ago, you’ve had nothing since. Let’s just, we’ll just leave everything as it is. But it is quite likely that they would put an exclusion on there. So they’re just a few examples in terms of the negligent side of things as to how that would work. And now the last one, the most serious, is deliberate or without any care, so this is where they’re saying you have actively misled them into arranging the contract, and I mean there can be times where this can go really, really not in a good way, and obviously there can sometimes be legal ramifications and things like that, but that is, that’s not usually the first step.

There usually has to be a few different steps, and probably some claims have been paid out, and then these things are figured out for the, for it to go to like a really, really bad place. But anyway, for the delivering or without care, what generally happens with that the insurer will know what’s canceled the policy from inception, that’s just a fancy term for saying they’re going to cancel it, you’ll get your premiums refunded in most instances, you’d get your premiums refunded, but they will just act as if the policy has never existed, and that obviously. Is not what we want to happen now. I don’t think that you know the majority, significant majority of people are in no way, shape or form paying out a monthly premium for something that they know they’ve deliberately lied in the application and risking the potential that they’re going to get caught out and ultimately themselves or potentially their loved ones aren’t going to get that payout, and again, you know, in terms of things, people might think, well, that’s really harsh from the insurer.

Kathryn Knowles 15:27

Well, ultimately, it’s a contract, you know, and the if the contract hasn’t been set up in the correct way, then it would be voided, just like so many other contracts and so many other situations that you would be in, so in some ways you know, look at a case of, like, let’s say you set up a contract with a friend that you’re giving them a loan of 20 grand, let’s say, and they say they’re going to pay it back within xy amount of time because they’re doing it to set up this business, and they’re doing this and that, and actually you end up finding out that they’ve not set it up for business, they’ve just taken you 20 grand and had a really good jolly holiday somewhere. You’re not going to be feeling in the best of ways. You pretty much know that that investment that you’ve made in this business isn’t going to be getting a return, and you’d want, obviously, for you, you’d want your money back, you know, you’d want your compensation back, and any of, seen in some ways, it’s no different, really, with insurers. You know, you’re giving them the money, they may potentially be giving you some money if you’re making a claim, depending upon the products, and if they realize that it’s not been the correct way, or it’s not been handled in the right way, then they’re not going to be best pleased, so let’s look at some examples. So, innocence. So, this is what they would say: it is perfectly perfect, perfectly reasonable that this was an innocent error, that this is just something you have forgotten about.

Okay, so I’m going to give a few examples. So, first one, let’s look at mental health. So, insurers tend to ask, have you had a mental health in the last five years? And let’s say you have had something like mild anxiety, mild stress in the past, and it all, the situation that you were in, resolved four years, 10 months ago, and in your mind it was five years ago, and you’ve not really sort of, when you go back to thinking about that time, that two month difference isn’t standing out to you, so you’ve said no, in the last five years I haven’t had stress and anxiety, so for something like life and critical illness cover, that would be seen as probably innocence, you know, you were two months off what you’d said, it’s not actually because those kinds of disclosures, in general, mild anxiety, mild stress, and I have to say, in general, because there are offshoots of those that could change the outcomes, but in life and critical illness cover, they don’t generally change the outcomes what you would receive now, compared to someone who hasn’t had those things, so the insurer probably goes, “You know what, yeah, it should have been, you should have told us, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome based upon our underwriting philosophy, so we’ll just carry on as we are now.

Income protection would be different, or very likely different. So, with income protection, if you’d had mental health in the last five years, it’s quite likely you would have a mental health exclusion on your policy, so in that one it will be seen more on the negligence side of things, but I’m just want to focus this on more like the innocent side, but I think it’s important to just be clear that different products can have different outcomes as well. So another innocent one, you’ve said no to family history, because insurers will generally ask, has anyone before the age of 60 or 65 in your family had one of these conditions, and it will be a list, you know, it will cover things like heart attack, stroke, cancer, Parkinson’s, is usually in there, Huntington’s can be in there as well, hunting disease, and there can be things like polyposis of the colony, there’s so many different things, and it could be that you have said no, and this is all about your blood-related relatives, perhaps saying just that, immediate parents and siblings, but let’s say you actually had one of your parents have cancer, age 42 but you’re a strain from your family, or you’re adopted, so the insurers would at that point say they would generally say that that was innocent, obviously.

Kathryn Knowles 19:23

If somebody who’s adopted absolutely innocent, if you find that out years down the line, because you suddenly are connected with your blood-related family, there is literally nothing you could have done differently there, but you’re strange. That can be a bit debatable sometimes, depending on time frames and things like that, but in general, it would be seen as quite innocent, and a lot of those questions now for family history, instead of it being yes or no, they will be there as options, they also have I don’t know as an option, so that can work really, really well for these kinds of situations. Another one is you said no. Said the insurer asks, have you had any tests or investigations in the last two to three years that can include blood tests, urine tests, scans, biopsies, anything like that? And you’ve said no, but actually you know there’s been about 26 months ago you had a blood test because you’re feeling tired. The GP said go for a blood test, it came back all clear, and actually everything’s fine, your tiredness went away. It was just probably a little bit of intensity in terms of work, maybe the kids were being a bit intense for, for a little bit as well.

But again, that will probably be seen as innocent, because obviously the results would have been clear. So, if you told them, it wouldn’t have made any difference to what you’re applying for. Another one, as well, a cold, you know, even having a cold and having medicine prescribed for a while, and you’ve forgotten about it, shouldn’t really affect things. There can be times it can, so I’m not going to say it doesn’t, but you know, overall it would probably seem as quite innocent, you know, especially if it hadn’t been something you’d had in, like, the last year or so. You know, people do forget. We all have very busy lives, and people forget why they’ve been to the GP or not. So, the key thing with the innocence is your actual answer wouldn’t have changed the underwriting outcome, that would be seen as, like, the innocent side of things. Now, we’ve got negligent, and again I’ve got a few examples here, and these are ones that we kind of, we come across, so this would be why I know that these are the things that can come up and hopefully help people, if it’s ones that we are coming across, it hopefully helps people to not do this, so drugs, recreational drugs insurers tend to ask, have you had recreational drugs in the last 10 years, and let’s say you have some cannabis at uni, and you know, because you know that you haven’t had any cannabis since the end of uni, it was something you were doing with your mates, bit of like relaxation during exam time, and that was eight years ago. Okay, you know, it was eight years ago, because that’s when you finished your degree, and you kind of think, well, it says 10 years, it was eight years. Who’s going to know, you know? And do you know what? In some cases, the answer is, they’re not going to know, you know, because unless it’s documented somewhere, things like that, you just, you just don’t know.

Kathryn Knowles 22:16

But there really, really isn’t any point in risking it, there is no point risking it, and saying that you haven’t done it in that time frame, and you have cannabis eight years ago probably isn’t going to affect your underwriting outcome with most insurers, and some insurers don’t even ask about cannabis, they specifically say, have you done recreational drugs, with the exception of cannabis, and the tricky thing can be is that what happens if something happens and you say it to the GP in the future, which is something again that we have come across, you know, where insurance has been done for somebody, they’ve then had a heart attack, and then the doctors have said to them, right, have you ever done this or this or this in the past, and they’ve said yes, and then all of a sudden it’s a case of rights, so it’s actually in the records that you’ve told your GP that you have done this and you didn’t say in the application, and that will then potentially come up at points of a claim, because you know this insurer, if you, if you pass or something, if you’re diagnosed with critical illness, they will then speak to your GP, the medical records, and they’ll go right.

Well, actually, so you have done it, you just didn’t tell us, and that would have changed the outcome. So, really, really worth not worth saying that you don’t. There’s another really key example of that with smokers as well, which I’ll come on to in a little bit. Another one that would be negligent at the moment would be GLP, so you as Zen Pick, you Mun Javo, anything else that were Gurvy. I’m trying to think of all the different names of them. You need to be so, so, so careful when you’re doing an application at the moment. So insurers that want to know about this, and they are still adapting their question sets in response to it, because obviously it’s not a recreational drug in the sense of the types of drugs that people would consider to be a recreational drug, but it is still something that you are putting in your body, so it can fall into the disclosure about medicine not prescribed by your GP, because a lot of people are buying these through a pharmacy, and what’s really important today is, if you are getting it through a pharmacy and you’re buying it, that is not often a prescription, and people are thinking that it is, so they’re saying no to this, because they’re thinking, oh, well, I’m being prescribed in my GP, and that’s not the case, so you just need to be super, super careful, because obviously some people are getting these medications absolutely prescribed through the NHS, but there are certain criteria and caveats to be able to access that, and even if that is the case, you would still need to say yes, because there is a question saying, have you been prescribed a medication from your GP, they’ll still. Lasted four weeks or more, so you would need to say yes.

So either which way, there is a question somewhere in these applications where you would need to say yes. So if you think it’s being prescribed by your GP, then you need to say yes to that. I’m being prescribed it by my GP. If you think no, I’m not being prescribed it by my GP, I’m buying it from an online pharmacy, so I don’t need to say yes to a GP prescription, then you need to say yes in the other question set to say that you have been taking medications not prescribed by your GP, and again it’s really, really not worth including it, because again in the future you might say to somebody, well, yes, I was taking this medication. You know, we are seeing that at times, not necessarily lots and lots, but there are some indications that taking these medications are causing issues with people’s kidneys, the pancreas, the liver. It’s still very unknown at the moment, because it’s still so early in the grand scheme of things, and obviously, if you’re then going to the GP because you’re feeling a bit out of sorts, and then your liver is a little bit out in the goal, why, why do you think that is?

Kathryn Knowles 26:08

Are you taking anything, and you say, “Yes, I’ve been taking these medicines, then that could be the case also, as well. There’s then the massive fluctuation in the weight side of things as well. So, insurers are absolutely taking this into account, and they are offering insurance to people who are taking these medications. So, don’t assume that by saying yes, that that means you can’t get the cover, or that it’s going to be silly pricing. It’s just that they need to know it’s just about that open honesty, and the transparency, and the clarity of it all. So, weight is another area where there can absolutely be negligence, and this can be really, really tricky area, but it’s really not best to guess, because again, you don’t know, you might go to the GP for some reason, you might just happen to have your weight checked while you’re there, it might be that you’ve now reached an age where you go for specific well person checks and things like that, or just general checkups every now and then, or it might be that you even have a medical through work, or sometimes I know that there’s like different drives in the area in terms of the NHS, and we’ll do certain things to you, I think I’ll just rock up and do that, and I know when there was everything happening with with Covid and the pandemic, they.. I can’t, but the name of it was now.. was it Our Future Health, I think it was called, and there was a thing about like where you could sign up and like report symptoms and different things in that.. and I also used to get things, both me.. my mom did, where they’d say, ‘Right, do you want to.. we’re trying to just keep really getting a good picture of everybody’s health, we’re trying to do like really specific population data, so would you be happy to pop along here, get your height, your weight, your blood pressure, your cholesterol done, and I was just like, absolutely, you know, if it helps in science, I’ll get it all done, so again, there, there would be a record of my weight, and big fluctuations in weight are something that insurers like to know about, really, that does depend upon the timings as well.

So, you know, if you have lost, you know, five stone over three years, that’s not going to really stand out to the insurers. They’ll probably make the assumption that you’ve changed something in terms of lifestyle, and that has been a gradual change in weight, if you’ve got very significant weight loss, then obviously the insurers like to know why that is, because it might be due to something like one of these medications, or it could be to do that there’s something happening inside, and that you’re possibly quite poorly, and so they do like to know the other thing as well, and the key thing here, in terms of rate, and why it would be negligent is the fact that at different levels of BMI, insurers change the pricing of their insurance, so once you’re starting to go over a BMI of 30, now this is very product dependent as well, these, the product pricing and BMI are different between life insurance and critical illness, income protection. Different ones will do different things.

You tend to find that the pricing increases more quickly with critical illness and income protection than life insurance, and there is a stage where you can’t arrange those insurances on the standard market, depending upon your BMI. Now, for quite a lot of insurances that is around the BMI of 40, some you can go up to BMI 50, and then there are some specialist insurers as well that can be approached if your BMI is over 50, but let’s say you are doing an application and you know, you find out that actually, if, if you say that you’re two stone lighter than you are, then the insurance you are paying for is going to be 10 pound a month cheaper, and that obviously it’s nicer to have the 10 pound in your pocket than with the insurer, but ultimately if you.

Kathryn Knowles 29:59

Know that if there’s records as well to show what your weight has been, and you’re simply saying it’s something very different, then again the insurer could well say, actually, you know, this isn’t this isn’t what we would expect. The other thing as well with that is even before doing the point of getting a policy in place is that with some insurances you need to have a medical that will depend upon your age and how much insurance you want and the type of insurance and again they would usually do your weight at that point, so if you’ve done an application and said that you’re 12 stone and actually at the medical you weigh in at 14 stone, that’s just going to completely change everything that you’ve been anticipating to receive in terms of the pricing, so it really doesn’t help the situation if we don’t say what it should be. So, again, you would have the similar situation.

The insurer would turn on and say to you, “Right, if we had known your weight when you’d settled the policy, we would have offered you this amount of insurance at this price, so you can either keep paying next a higher price and keep that level of insurance and make up the premiums that amounts that we’ve been missing, or you can keep paying the same price and reduces them assured it’s completely up to you when you’re looking at something like that. So basically the key thing with the negligence is your actual answer would have resulted in different terms, such as a higher premium or an exclusion. Okay, now the deliberate one. So, this is where you know you should have answered differently, and you know this. I’m going to give some examples. They might seem quite extreme examples. I don’t know if they will do or not, but it’s worth, obviously, me covering them, so and there are actually, when it, when it comes to deliberate, I have to say, though, it is actually, it does tend to be more the extreme examples, and, and you know, so it’s hard to give examples, because I wouldn’t ever want it to seem, you know, if someone’s been in this situation as if it’s there’s any kind of judgment or things like that, so everybody has their own reasons as to why they would do certain things, but also it does mean that I would be using examples that are quite emotive, so let’s just be, I’m just going to try and be really careful with the examples I give here, so deliberate, so alcohol would be a really specific one here, so you’re drinking 40 units of alcohol a week, which might sound, when you say 40 units of alcohol, might sound like quite a lot, and which, in the grand scheme of things, it is higher than what would be medically advised, and that’s even from the British, the BMA, so British Medical Association, but it’s actually quite easy for people to get to 40 units, whether or not that is, you know, having a bottle of wine or not every night, or having a really, really good night out on a Saturday after work, it’s, it can be done, and you have been told by the GP to consider cutting down, you know, your alcohol consumption. It’s not being like you’ve not needed a referral to any kind of alcohol support system. There’s been no indication that you’ve got any concerns with your liver, and there’s no indication that you’ve got any kind of an addiction. It’s just your GPS said, you know, actually, that’s that’s high. So, will you know if they ask you about alcohol, and you’re above what’s now 14 units is the recommended allowance, and they will say to you, as part and parcel of their role, you know, well, you should consider reducing 14 anyway.

Kathryn Knowles 33:31

Let’s say you have 40 units, GP said that to you, but you tell the insurer that you drink 20 units a week and had no advice to reduce, because they will ask about units of alcohol with most insurers, and they usually will ask about any kind of advice as well, and that will be seen as deliberate, you know, you’re drinking more, you know that the GP has told you that, and you’ve deliberately said you’re drinking a lot less, and that would be a situation where we would pretty confidently assume that it would be voided, so cancel from inception. And then we’ve also got sorry, the next one, so things like outstanding tests and investigations that you have now. An outstanding test and investigation will usually mean that an insurer, if they know about it at application stage, will generally say they want you to have that investigation, and for to be completed, and the results to be known before they will consider your application, which can be frustrating, but that is better than saying no, I haven’t got anything, so as an example, you’ve gone to see your GP, and so this is actually an example that we are very, very familiar with.

It happened to somebody that we had been supporting, unfortunately, and so we had obviously gone through the applications that we’d asked all. All the questions that you ask, you say about being open, you know. Have you had any of these appointments? Are you outstanding any investigations? And the person speaking to us had said no. And unfortunately, it was a horrible situation. Unfortunately, the person passed away, and they did pass away from cancer, and the insured didn’t pay the claim, and we were kicking off like mad. We were absolutely kicking off at the insurer, and unfortunately, what ended up resulting was, is that from when the client had done the application with us, and we’d asked those questions within a week before they did the application with us, they had spoken to their GP about some discomfort that they’d had, and the GP had said to them, we need to refer you, because it could be, it could be cancer. So, in this situation, I honestly, as well, think in that situation, that in some, in many ways, that person didn’t do it deliberately.

I think that they had compartmentalized what was happening, and for them had genuinely answered that no, because they had blocked it, but unfortunately that that would be considered to be deliberate, because it is something that you are, you should have reasonably been aware that it should have been a yes to that question set, so the key thing with that is that you know you should have given a different answer, and the underwriting outcome would have been a postponement or a decline, that would be generally where they would say it was deliberate and without care. Another area for this would be things like sports, so riding a motorbike, a lot of insurers ask about it. Say, do you ride a motorbike? And you know, you might think I better say no, because if not going to put the price up, some insurers are absolutely going to put the price up if you ride a motorbike, but not all insurers ask about it. So, in many ways, find the insurer that doesn’t ask about motorbikes, that’s the simple solution. And there’s lots and lots of examples like that as well, but I think that probably gives some really good background as to what we might be seeing, and when people say, you know, well, insurers don’t pay us, I mean, the majority of insurers in the protection insurance space are, I think, on average, well over on 97% or higher in terms of claim success rate for things like life insurance, critical illness cover, the times that they don’t pay out are for there were a number of different reasons, and I would absolutely say there’s certainly times when the insurers are not perfect and don’t get it right, and that things need to be challenged and stuff like that, but they do pay out millions, you know, hundreds of millions a year in these insurances.

Kathryn Knowles 37:49

They really do pay out, so the times that they don’t tend to pay out are where the policies actually ended and somebody hasn’t realized and they’ve tried to make a claim, where the person hasn’t kept up to date with their payments, so maybe somebody hasn’t paid their premiums for a good nine months or so, and then unfortunately they passed away. Well, during that time period, the insurer would have closed the policy down, because if you’re not paying for it, they won’t keep it active. There has been some really extenuating circumstances where insurers have still honored the claim, even though the policy hasn’t been paid and been paid into, but that is very, very individual circumstance, and it was very, very, very much an extenuating circumstances, the ones that come to the top of my mind, and then the other one is this situation where people have non-disclosed, and that would be more on the where it’s the deliberate or without care, because again, if it was the negligent, if it was innocent, if it was innocent, they pretty much have a duty to still honor the claim in terms of being treating customers fairly.

If it was negligent, then what they would possibly do is say, look, if we’d known everything, you know, we would say that, you know, that example again of, you know, sort of, if we’d known, instead of, if you’re paying 15 pound a month, instead of 100,000 we’d have given you 85,000 so what we’re going to do is do a claim of 85,000 not the full 100 that the family was expecting, or that you were expecting, if it was something like critical illness cover, and so obviously just bear that in mind. So, when they don’t pay out, it is where there has been something that they, they really didn’t know about, and so these issues don’t usually come to light until the claim, just as examples in the last thing that anybody wants to be facing is for either yourself or for a loved one to be trying to go through a claim, which isn’t a nice process at all. And obviously, so I’ve been very open. My mum passed away about three and a half months ago now, and there was no insurances in place, which is. Absolutely fine, because there was, there was enough, you know, in terms of things to be able to do funeral and things like that, and whatever was needed, but with everything that I had to deal with from an administration side of things, because obviously, again, I’ve been open, so it’s not just my mom’s past, my dad has Parkinson’s and dementia, and she was his full-time carer, so I’ve had to step in and sort all of that side of things for him as well.

I couldn’t be bothered to be doing an insurance claim, an argument and insurer at the same point. Now, I mean, insurance have tried, and they are trying to do as much as possible to improve the claims process, you know, they try and do everything as digital as possible now, and they try, and you know, once the claims with them, they try and have it paid, you know, within a very short, short period of time, wherever is humanly possible. So, having things like insurances in trust that massively helps the situation, all that kind of thing. But anyway, I’m digressing. But anyway, so the last thing we want a point of claim is for these discrepancies to be happening. We need the information to be matching your, essentially your medical records. That’s the really, really key thing, that is where the insurers are potentially going to look into question about things. So we want to make sure that it’s accurate, so I, that’s one of the reasons that I actually really like it when insurers do go for GP reports for my clients, because then we know we know exactly that the insurer has seen everything in your medical records up to this date, so the likelihood of them being able to say you didn’t tell us everything is really, really incredibly low, because they, what else could they have? They’ve got the medical records right there in front of them.

Kathryn Knowles 41:46

So I am a massive advocate of, I actually quite happy when the GP records are called for, but this can also lead to another issue that we do see, and in many ways it’s even more of a reason why seeing a GP record is, is really a positive, is that we see lots of errors in GP records and things that are just in there that just are not accurate, often around things like alcohol, actually, and like it might say we had something very, very recently at Cure, where there was someone where they’d gone to the GP just because I think it was that they’d signed up to a new GP, and it was just part and parcel of the GP practice to go through everything as they do when they’re onboarding somebody and say, oh, here’s just some guidance, make sure you don’t drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week, things like that, and from the GP report they ensures us that we should advise to reduce, and it’s like, no, she hasn’t. She’s literally signed up for the GP surgery, and they’ve given her, they’ve gone through the standard process. No, it says here.

And then we had to get a letter from the GP to confirm, no, that’s not the instance case at all. I was literally just going through my procedures to say that make sure you don’t drink more than 14 units, there’s no concern about alcohol here at all. Now, the difference, you might think, oh, well, you know, it’s a bit, yeah, it’s just one of those things. But how do you correct that in 20 years’ time? When we’re talking about these insurance products, we are talking about things that are being set up often for 20, 3040, years, some of them are whole of life in 20 years time, if there was a claim on it, how is it so I could touch what it won’t happen, but let’s say there was a claim for me, how would, if there’s an error in my GP reports, how would my husband be able to debate that and argue and say, well, no, she wasn’t drinking heavily, and didn’t show, I was just going to say, well, it says it, the doctor that I was probably seeing at that point is probably retired and no longer there, so new doctors are going to be like, well, I can’t put my name to it to say she wasn’t drinking, because I didn’t even know her, so it’s really, really tricky, and it is important because it is important to get those records corrected, and not only, obviously, I mean, from an insurance point of view, yes, it’s important, but just generally as well for your health and for your well-being, if you, for some reason, end up in hospital and your medical records are wrong, and things like that, then you might not get the treatment that you need, or it might be done in a slightly different way than it should be, because of an inaccurate record, and that’s I always like to say, as well, that is not me NHS bashing at all, the NHS is absolutely wonderful, and it took such good care of my mum.

It’s taking such good care of my dad. I am here. I would say the reason I’m alive is because of the NHS, because of all the different things that I’ve experienced and gone through, and different stuff like that. And so it is an absolutely phenomenal organization, but there are errors in record keeping, and it is massively underfunded. So, it’s certainly not a criticism of anybody who works in the NHS, and also, as well, sometimes it is really, really easy to just tap the wrong code, and we’ve had. Before, with people, where there’s literally like one code next to the other, the wrong ones tapped, so you can just also get human error sometimes, but really important to double check that. So I personally highly advocate that, especially when you are going for insurance, you know, log into your NHS app, log on to whatever you can do, whatever systems your GP provides, and try and access your medical records, double check, you know, again, that thing of anything in the last two, three years.

Kathryn Knowles 45:24

We’ll just have a look back, so it might only be that the records go back that far that you can access, and but just make sure that what’s in there is what you think, and to your knowledge, what should be in there. And another last thing, in terms of the under disclosure from an advisor point of view is, you know, if you’re going through an application with a client over the phone, and you know you can really pick up on any kind of, if there’s any means or havings to the answers, you can say, well, look, do you want to just chat through that, so that you know we can, I can help you decide if it needs to go in there or not, and but there’s a lot of things happening now with delegate access, where we, as advisors, set up the application, but then hand it over electronically to the client to complete themselves at a time and place it suits them, which really it’s works for a lot of people who’ve been very, very busy, and then they pass it back to us before it goes back to the insurer, and so we can check it over.

What I would say as advice is just make sure you really check it over, especially for that under disclosure side of things. So I had something not long ago where I was supporting somebody, and it was I was reviewing a cover, I was doing new cover, so I’d known about their disclosures from the previous time I delegated the app, app came in, checking it over, and I noticed that one of the disclosures was missing, and again it was innocent, really innocent compared to the time frames and what I’ve been asked, and things like that. It’s just because I was being quite vigilant, obviously, that I was able to spot it, and so I changed it, and before I submitted it, I said to the client, like, I’m just letting you know, I’ve changed this answer to this. Are you happy for me to submit it with that answer? Because obviously you do need to have their permission still to submit any changes, and you know, straight, it was like, oh yeah, absolutely, completely didn’t even realize on the time frames. Now that would be an innocent non-disclosure, I know it would be, because of the situation that I’m referring to with it, but it’s just better to avoid it.

We just don’t want to have anything like that at all. It would be a lot of headache at claim stage that we can avoid if possible. So, basically, under disclosure, don’t do it. So, let’s try our best not to do it, and just bear in mind for people who are obviously uncertain about insurers and their willingness to pay out claims and stuff like that. Look at the stats as to what they do pay out, and I’m talking about protection insurance here, so that’s your life insurance, your criticalness income protection. I’m not talking about other insurances, because I don’t work in that space. That’s in a sense, it’s almost like a different industry to what we work in, and so I don’t know all the stats there, but you know, it takes a lot for an insurer to go. We are going to say this is deliberate. We are just not going to pay out at all. They will look at alternatives, they will try and make it work for the person before the jump to that step. And so, you know, don’t panic. And, but if you ask somebody who has maybe answered a question you’re not sure about it, then I’d say just reach out to an advisor, you know, there’s many, many advisors in the UK who would be able to review answers that you’ve given in an application set and make sure that it’s all done correctly, and yeah, hopefully, hopefully we can really do steps to make sure everything goes right for people throughout the whole process of getting it submitted right through to that claim stage. So, thank you for listening, everybody. Next time, Alan is going to be back with me, and we’re going to be doing another deep dive into a medical disclosure that is yet to be decided.

Kathryn Knowles 48:53

So, if you have any disclosures that you would like us to go over, let me know within the next week or so, and we will do our best to cover it, you can visit the website practical-protection.co.uk to access all of our episodes, as well as all podcast platforms, and also your CPD certificates. And that is a big thank you to Planner X, who sponsors and provide those certificates. Thank you, everybody. Speak soon.

Transcript Disclaimer:

Episodes of the Practical Protection Podcast include a transcript of the episode’s audio. The text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record.

We often discuss health and medical conditions in relation to protection insurance and underwriting, always consult with a healthcare professional if you are concerned about any medical conditions and symptoms we have covered in any episode.

Episode 1 - Underdisclosure

Hi, everybody, it’s the start of Season 12 and I’m focusing on underdisclosure in protection insurance. Also known as misrepresentation or non-disclosure, this is a situation that everyone wants to avoid. Underdisclosure might not change the terms of insurance, but, it can lead to prices or sum assureds changing, and in the worst case a policy being cancelled from inception.

The key takeaways:

  • Non-disclosure is seen as innocent, negligent or deliberate
  • It can be tricky sometimes to remember everything in your medical history that the insurer wants to know, so accessing your medical records before applying for cover can be a big help
  • Examples of insurance questions in protection insurance where we see underdisclosure

Alan will be back with me next time for a deep dive into a medical condition and how it’s underwritten for protection insurance. We are always happy to take your suggestions on what to cover so please feel free to fire over any areas that you would like us to go into.

Remember, if you are listening to this as part of your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on our website, thanks to our sponsors PlannerX.

RETURN TO VIEW ALL EPISODES

Kathryn Knowles 00:10

Hi everybody, we are on season 12, episode one. Can't believe we're already at 12 seasons, and coming up on six and a half years of the Practical Protection Podcast, which feels really, really crazy to me. There's been such a huge amount of things happening in the last six and a half years. So, anyway, let's get straight into it. Today, we are going to be starting off this season by talking about under disclosure when it comes to arranging protection insurance in the UK. This is the Practical Protection Podcast, so last time, end of season 11, I covered over disclosure, and now it's time to do under disclosure. So, under disclosure is the thing that a lot of people tend to worry about. Naturally, it makes a lot of sense to be concerned about it, because you don't want to do anything that would mean that the insurer can say, well, you didn't tell us everything, which then has the flip side of the oath of disclosure. I do recommend listening in on that one, because that also has its own risks too.

But under disclosure basically means that you've not told the insurer everything that they needed to know to make a clear decision as to your circumstances and if they would offer you the insurance, and if so, what terms that would be, it is the kind of area of the undisclosure where it doesn't always happen, but sometimes I still hear it from people that go, "Oh, insures will do anything to not pay out, will there? There'll be something somewhere, and they won't do this because it won't make this, and it's a case of, well, you know, some people, you know, if you feel that way, that is obviously the way that you feel, but most of the time you know discrepancies are ultimately they are discrepancies, and this is a contract. It's a contract between you and the insurer, and what I like to say to people is essentially we're looking at a snapshot of each other, so this is two people, one of them is a business, obviously, the insurer, but there's two sides here taking a snapshot of each other and saying, I agree to enter into this contract with you.

I think sometimes people don't realize, obviously, you know, obviously, essentially it is a contract, and you know, there are certain rules and laws around contracts and things like that, but they sent the insurer is looking at the applicants and saying right based upon your age now and your smoker status, your height, weight, all this information about your health, your travel, the activities you do, we think that you know we can offer you this insurance and it'll cost this much and you decide yes or no if you want to take that, and then similarly the other way, you are looking at the insurer, and you're looking at their key features document, which would come with the protection insurance, and saying, "Right, I'm looking at you now. You've said that you can offer me this policy, which does this, this, and this for this amount of time, and as long as I keep paying for it, it will pay out if xyz happens. Okay, I accept that, and we're going to go ahead with that. So, just like the insurer, you know, the insurer can't just end a policy without good reason. They have to have very, very good reason, which we will go through in terms of this under disclosure.

But basically, both sides mutually agree, as long as they can both fairly understand the contract that they are getting into, so you as a consumer need to be able to understand clearly what you're getting into, which is why there's these key features documents. Why there are people like brokers like myself who will explain the contracts to you and what you are not covered for. The insurer as well, also has the right to know that they have seen everything that they need to see in to be able to tough the insurance to you. So, going over a little bit again as to what we did last time, so we do have the Consumer Insurance Disclosure and Representations Act of 2012 which is often shortened to Cidra.

Kathryn Knowles 04:19

Now, this primarily was focused upon giving, I think, you know, sorry, really key protections to consumers, and it basically said that, you know, insurers could no longer work upon utmost good faith, you know, they couldn't work on this thing of well, they should have told me this, or they should have told me that, and they didn't, so we're just going to not pay out, you know. The insurers could be farther, I've said that you should have volunteered material facts, even if they hadn't asked about it. So, with Sidra, it very, very, very sort of like basic side of things, and they basically required insurers to go. Look at themselves and go right, if we want to know about XYZ, then we need a question in there to ask about it, because essentially, as well, the background to it was when there's when the insurers were saying what you need to volunteer material facts, it's a case of, well, who knows what material fact is, as a broker I would have a pretty good idea as to what the insurers would want to know, but your ordinary person on the street, who's never worked in insurance or finance, who's never even seen an insurance application before.

How did that, and that's the question is in front of them. How are they possibly meant to know what a material factor is? And that was seen as being unfair, and obviously that's why these things came into place, so it does say that obviously the insurers need to ask the right questions, you know, if they don't ask about it, then that clearly means that they're not concerned about it, but it also does, on the other side as well, mean that you, as a consumer, must provide a fair representation of yourself to the insurer, you need to answer the questions honestly and carefully, and to the best of your knowledge. So, basically, we don't need to volunteer extra information, but we just need to make sure that we are giving the insurer a really good idea of that snapshot of our life, and that will include, obviously, even though I'm saying a snapshot, it's like it's a snapshot of most things up until that time. There are different times of different time frames, which I'll go through in a little bit as well. But essentially, it was a big change in the industry, and a really, really welcome one as well, because you know, there were times when maybe people were signing up for things, not understanding the questions, and very innocently answering things incorrectly, but then that would have maybe led to claims not being covered, which obviously, no matter what, is going to have some negativity in terms of the how we perceive the insurance world.

On the other side as well, there are going to be people who would have actually deliberately not said the truth, so they could get the insurance on the hope that it would just pay out if at certain circumstances happens. I'm not saying that that's obviously the majority of people, I think it is very, very much minority of people that would do that, but unfortunately there is that situation, so the there's been positives for both sides, for the insurance and consumers, in terms of this change. So, especially with under disclosure, we're really talking about what's known as misrepresentation on non-disclosure, and there's three main types, and you can look into a lot more. There's the Association of British insurers, which is the ABI, they do have a document known as a non-disclosure and treating customers fairly claims for long-term protection insurance products document, which is pretty hefty, and you know you need to be in the right mindset to read something like that, but you know I'm going to give you a nice summary, so with some examples, so hopefully you don't feel that the needle to sit down with that, with that PDF, which is is long and very insurance-wordy jargon, would be probably the right word. It's written really, really well.

Kathryn Knowles 08:14

I'm not going to, I'm not doing the AMI or anything, but if you're not into this kind of thing, and insurance doesn't give you a buzz, it's not exactly going to be the most thrilling of reads, so examples of where there would be what's known as a non-disclosure, so that would be the first one, be innocence, so innocence is that for the wording, sort of like that a reasonable person, that's kind of like the term that's used, I'm not completely sure if I like the idea of the framing of a reasonable person, but I think it's basically saying that somebody of sound mind who is able to answer these questions and understand them and to be able to give an answer accurately, this is sort of like what they would expect, that basically an innocent one would be is that it genuinely was innocent, the what you have told them or not told them wouldn't have made a difference to the outcome. I'll give some examples of these very, very soon. We then have negligence, which isn't actually the worst one, even though it does sound - I think the word negligent does make it sound like whoa there, but that is something where you should have known that you should have given a different answer, or it's, it's reasonable to assume that you should have been aware that your answer wasn't completely accurate, and it would have changed the terms that the insurer would have offered, and what you tend to find with that situation is that the sum assured or the premium has changed, so I'll give a very, very, very basic example, just because it's easier for me with the numbers in my head, because I'm just doing this completely off the top of my head. So, let's say somebody arranged 100,000 pounds of life insurance, and it cost them 15 pound per month now.

How it comes to life, maybe they're reviewing the cover with a broker, and they tell the broker something from the past, and the broker looks and says, because he can tell I'm using this from experience, and we look at the old policy and go, okay, right, you've told me this information, so obviously amazing, thank you for letting me know that and making me aware, but I'm pretty certain that that means that that wasn't included in your previous application. Key thing there is not to panic, not to worry, and because there's usually a good resolution from it. It could also be that the questions that were asked in that application from however many years ago meant that that disclosure didn't actually need to be in there the majority of the time. I think if you speak to a really established broker like myself, we would know pretty quickly if it should have been in the application or not. You know, when you've done this for what mile now? I am 15 years, I'm trying to think now. No, sick. Hang on a minute. Yes, 16 years I've been in the industry. Wow, that's there's a year there that's just completely gone. Actually, I was gonna say that's probably about six years or something that's completely gone out of my head, right? Yes, I've been doing this a while, and you get really, really familiar with the question sets and what insurers would and wouldn't know, and so. and this is something I've had happen with people for, so I'll just say, you know, at that time I say, get me a copy of the application, let's double check if it should have been in there or not, and then let's speak to the insurer, and there is a number of different things that can happen from that, and so it could be a say that it's maybe seen as innocence of the insurer says it doesn't matter, or it might be that the good, you know, what actually technically that was negligent, but with so many years down the line, and this was so many years ago, that we're actually just going to leave it as it is, because if you applied again now, you know, we would leave everything as it is, it's.. I'm not saying it would happen that way, it's.

Kathryn Knowles 12:00

I've experienced it before, it's not the most common outcome, but it is a potential, but generally with negligent, they would turn and say, "Look, you really should have told us that, and you know this would have been different, so, so we're going to do this. You applied for 100,000 you've had 100,000 at 15 pounds per month. Well, actually, if we'd been aware of this information, you'd have had 100,000 pounds, and it would have been 22 pounds per month. I'm making numbers up, by the way, but I'm giving a good general estimate of things. So either you can start paying 22 pounds per month and keep 100,000 pound, and actually, what you do need to do as well is make up that seven pound difference for each month that you've not paid the 22 pounds up to now, or what we can do is keep you at 15 pound, but let's say they'll, they'll go right, but we're going to drop the summer short to, I don't know, 85 grand or something like that, so that can be a potential option when it's negligent.

The other thing would be, and it's been more obviously in the income protection space, and again, I'll give a bit of an example of this in a bit, is that they might say, well, look, if you told us that, we would have given you the insurance, but there would have been an exclusion for claims relating, let's, let's say somebody had pulled a tendon in their right leg a couple of years ago, and so the intro, like, look, if you told us that, and we were aware of that, we would have actually excluded claims for your right leg, so you can keep your policy, but you're not going to get cover for claims relating to that right leg, so some might do that again, if it was quite a while ago, then I said, you know what, it's all that time ago, you've had nothing since. Let's just, we'll just leave everything as it is. But it is quite likely that they would put an exclusion on there. So they're just a few examples in terms of the negligent side of things as to how that would work. And now the last one, the most serious, is deliberate or without any care, so this is where they're saying you have actively misled them into arranging the contract, and I mean there can be times where this can go really, really not in a good way, and obviously there can sometimes be legal ramifications and things like that, but that is, that's not usually the first step.

There usually has to be a few different steps, and probably some claims have been paid out, and then these things are figured out for the, for it to go to like a really, really bad place. But anyway, for the delivering or without care, what generally happens with that the insurer will know what's canceled the policy from inception, that's just a fancy term for saying they're going to cancel it, you'll get your premiums refunded in most instances, you'd get your premiums refunded, but they will just act as if the policy has never existed, and that obviously. Is not what we want to happen now. I don't think that you know the majority, significant majority of people are in no way, shape or form paying out a monthly premium for something that they know they've deliberately lied in the application and risking the potential that they're going to get caught out and ultimately themselves or potentially their loved ones aren't going to get that payout, and again, you know, in terms of things, people might think, well, that's really harsh from the insurer.

Kathryn Knowles 15:27

Well, ultimately, it's a contract, you know, and the if the contract hasn't been set up in the correct way, then it would be voided, just like so many other contracts and so many other situations that you would be in, so in some ways you know, look at a case of, like, let's say you set up a contract with a friend that you're giving them a loan of 20 grand, let's say, and they say they're going to pay it back within xy amount of time because they're doing it to set up this business, and they're doing this and that, and actually you end up finding out that they've not set it up for business, they've just taken you 20 grand and had a really good jolly holiday somewhere. You're not going to be feeling in the best of ways. You pretty much know that that investment that you've made in this business isn't going to be getting a return, and you'd want, obviously, for you, you'd want your money back, you know, you'd want your compensation back, and any of, seen in some ways, it's no different, really, with insurers. You know, you're giving them the money, they may potentially be giving you some money if you're making a claim, depending upon the products, and if they realize that it's not been the correct way, or it's not been handled in the right way, then they're not going to be best pleased, so let's look at some examples. So, innocence. So, this is what they would say: it is perfectly perfect, perfectly reasonable that this was an innocent error, that this is just something you have forgotten about.

Okay, so I'm going to give a few examples. So, first one, let's look at mental health. So, insurers tend to ask, have you had a mental health in the last five years? And let's say you have had something like mild anxiety, mild stress in the past, and it all, the situation that you were in, resolved four years, 10 months ago, and in your mind it was five years ago, and you've not really sort of, when you go back to thinking about that time, that two month difference isn't standing out to you, so you've said no, in the last five years I haven't had stress and anxiety, so for something like life and critical illness cover, that would be seen as probably innocence, you know, you were two months off what you'd said, it's not actually because those kinds of disclosures, in general, mild anxiety, mild stress, and I have to say, in general, because there are offshoots of those that could change the outcomes, but in life and critical illness cover, they don't generally change the outcomes what you would receive now, compared to someone who hasn't had those things, so the insurer probably goes, "You know what, yeah, it should have been, you should have told us, but it wouldn't have changed the outcome based upon our underwriting philosophy, so we'll just carry on as we are now.

Income protection would be different, or very likely different. So, with income protection, if you'd had mental health in the last five years, it's quite likely you would have a mental health exclusion on your policy, so in that one it will be seen more on the negligence side of things, but I'm just want to focus this on more like the innocent side, but I think it's important to just be clear that different products can have different outcomes as well. So another innocent one, you've said no to family history, because insurers will generally ask, has anyone before the age of 60 or 65 in your family had one of these conditions, and it will be a list, you know, it will cover things like heart attack, stroke, cancer, Parkinson's, is usually in there, Huntington's can be in there as well, hunting disease, and there can be things like polyposis of the colony, there's so many different things, and it could be that you have said no, and this is all about your blood-related relatives, perhaps saying just that, immediate parents and siblings, but let's say you actually had one of your parents have cancer, age 42 but you're a strain from your family, or you're adopted, so the insurers would at that point say they would generally say that that was innocent, obviously.

Kathryn Knowles 19:23

If somebody who's adopted absolutely innocent, if you find that out years down the line, because you suddenly are connected with your blood-related family, there is literally nothing you could have done differently there, but you're strange. That can be a bit debatable sometimes, depending on time frames and things like that, but in general, it would be seen as quite innocent, and a lot of those questions now for family history, instead of it being yes or no, they will be there as options, they also have I don't know as an option, so that can work really, really well for these kinds of situations. Another one is you said no. Said the insurer asks, have you had any tests or investigations in the last two to three years that can include blood tests, urine tests, scans, biopsies, anything like that? And you've said no, but actually you know there's been about 26 months ago you had a blood test because you're feeling tired. The GP said go for a blood test, it came back all clear, and actually everything's fine, your tiredness went away. It was just probably a little bit of intensity in terms of work, maybe the kids were being a bit intense for, for a little bit as well.

But again, that will probably be seen as innocent, because obviously the results would have been clear. So, if you told them, it wouldn't have made any difference to what you're applying for. Another one, as well, a cold, you know, even having a cold and having medicine prescribed for a while, and you've forgotten about it, shouldn't really affect things. There can be times it can, so I'm not going to say it doesn't, but you know, overall it would probably seem as quite innocent, you know, especially if it hadn't been something you'd had in, like, the last year or so. You know, people do forget. We all have very busy lives, and people forget why they've been to the GP or not. So, the key thing with the innocence is your actual answer wouldn't have changed the underwriting outcome, that would be seen as, like, the innocent side of things. Now, we've got negligent, and again I've got a few examples here, and these are ones that we kind of, we come across, so this would be why I know that these are the things that can come up and hopefully help people, if it's ones that we are coming across, it hopefully helps people to not do this, so drugs, recreational drugs insurers tend to ask, have you had recreational drugs in the last 10 years, and let's say you have some cannabis at uni, and you know, because you know that you haven't had any cannabis since the end of uni, it was something you were doing with your mates, bit of like relaxation during exam time, and that was eight years ago. Okay, you know, it was eight years ago, because that's when you finished your degree, and you kind of think, well, it says 10 years, it was eight years. Who's going to know, you know? And do you know what? In some cases, the answer is, they're not going to know, you know, because unless it's documented somewhere, things like that, you just, you just don't know.

Kathryn Knowles 22:16

But there really, really isn't any point in risking it, there is no point risking it, and saying that you haven't done it in that time frame, and you have cannabis eight years ago probably isn't going to affect your underwriting outcome with most insurers, and some insurers don't even ask about cannabis, they specifically say, have you done recreational drugs, with the exception of cannabis, and the tricky thing can be is that what happens if something happens and you say it to the GP in the future, which is something again that we have come across, you know, where insurance has been done for somebody, they've then had a heart attack, and then the doctors have said to them, right, have you ever done this or this or this in the past, and they've said yes, and then all of a sudden it's a case of rights, so it's actually in the records that you've told your GP that you have done this and you didn't say in the application, and that will then potentially come up at points of a claim, because you know this insurer, if you, if you pass or something, if you're diagnosed with critical illness, they will then speak to your GP, the medical records, and they'll go right.

Well, actually, so you have done it, you just didn't tell us, and that would have changed the outcome. So, really, really worth not worth saying that you don't. There's another really key example of that with smokers as well, which I'll come on to in a little bit. Another one that would be negligent at the moment would be GLP, so you as Zen Pick, you Mun Javo, anything else that were Gurvy. I'm trying to think of all the different names of them. You need to be so, so, so careful when you're doing an application at the moment. So insurers that want to know about this, and they are still adapting their question sets in response to it, because obviously it's not a recreational drug in the sense of the types of drugs that people would consider to be a recreational drug, but it is still something that you are putting in your body, so it can fall into the disclosure about medicine not prescribed by your GP, because a lot of people are buying these through a pharmacy, and what's really important today is, if you are getting it through a pharmacy and you're buying it, that is not often a prescription, and people are thinking that it is, so they're saying no to this, because they're thinking, oh, well, I'm being prescribed in my GP, and that's not the case, so you just need to be super, super careful, because obviously some people are getting these medications absolutely prescribed through the NHS, but there are certain criteria and caveats to be able to access that, and even if that is the case, you would still need to say yes, because there is a question saying, have you been prescribed a medication from your GP, they'll still. Lasted four weeks or more, so you would need to say yes.

So either which way, there is a question somewhere in these applications where you would need to say yes. So if you think it's being prescribed by your GP, then you need to say yes to that. I'm being prescribed it by my GP. If you think no, I'm not being prescribed it by my GP, I'm buying it from an online pharmacy, so I don't need to say yes to a GP prescription, then you need to say yes in the other question set to say that you have been taking medications not prescribed by your GP, and again it's really, really not worth including it, because again in the future you might say to somebody, well, yes, I was taking this medication. You know, we are seeing that at times, not necessarily lots and lots, but there are some indications that taking these medications are causing issues with people's kidneys, the pancreas, the liver. It's still very unknown at the moment, because it's still so early in the grand scheme of things, and obviously, if you're then going to the GP because you're feeling a bit out of sorts, and then your liver is a little bit out in the goal, why, why do you think that is?

Kathryn Knowles 26:08

Are you taking anything, and you say, "Yes, I've been taking these medicines, then that could be the case also, as well. There's then the massive fluctuation in the weight side of things as well. So, insurers are absolutely taking this into account, and they are offering insurance to people who are taking these medications. So, don't assume that by saying yes, that that means you can't get the cover, or that it's going to be silly pricing. It's just that they need to know it's just about that open honesty, and the transparency, and the clarity of it all. So, weight is another area where there can absolutely be negligence, and this can be really, really tricky area, but it's really not best to guess, because again, you don't know, you might go to the GP for some reason, you might just happen to have your weight checked while you're there, it might be that you've now reached an age where you go for specific well person checks and things like that, or just general checkups every now and then, or it might be that you even have a medical through work, or sometimes I know that there's like different drives in the area in terms of the NHS, and we'll do certain things to you, I think I'll just rock up and do that, and I know when there was everything happening with with Covid and the pandemic, they.. I can't, but the name of it was now.. was it Our Future Health, I think it was called, and there was a thing about like where you could sign up and like report symptoms and different things in that.. and I also used to get things, both me.. my mom did, where they'd say, 'Right, do you want to.. we're trying to just keep really getting a good picture of everybody's health, we're trying to do like really specific population data, so would you be happy to pop along here, get your height, your weight, your blood pressure, your cholesterol done, and I was just like, absolutely, you know, if it helps in science, I'll get it all done, so again, there, there would be a record of my weight, and big fluctuations in weight are something that insurers like to know about, really, that does depend upon the timings as well.

So, you know, if you have lost, you know, five stone over three years, that's not going to really stand out to the insurers. They'll probably make the assumption that you've changed something in terms of lifestyle, and that has been a gradual change in weight, if you've got very significant weight loss, then obviously the insurers like to know why that is, because it might be due to something like one of these medications, or it could be to do that there's something happening inside, and that you're possibly quite poorly, and so they do like to know the other thing as well, and the key thing here, in terms of rate, and why it would be negligent is the fact that at different levels of BMI, insurers change the pricing of their insurance, so once you're starting to go over a BMI of 30, now this is very product dependent as well, these, the product pricing and BMI are different between life insurance and critical illness, income protection. Different ones will do different things.

You tend to find that the pricing increases more quickly with critical illness and income protection than life insurance, and there is a stage where you can't arrange those insurances on the standard market, depending upon your BMI. Now, for quite a lot of insurances that is around the BMI of 40, some you can go up to BMI 50, and then there are some specialist insurers as well that can be approached if your BMI is over 50, but let's say you are doing an application and you know, you find out that actually, if, if you say that you're two stone lighter than you are, then the insurance you are paying for is going to be 10 pound a month cheaper, and that obviously it's nicer to have the 10 pound in your pocket than with the insurer, but ultimately if you.

Kathryn Knowles 29:59

Know that if there's records as well to show what your weight has been, and you're simply saying it's something very different, then again the insurer could well say, actually, you know, this isn't this isn't what we would expect. The other thing as well with that is even before doing the point of getting a policy in place is that with some insurances you need to have a medical that will depend upon your age and how much insurance you want and the type of insurance and again they would usually do your weight at that point, so if you've done an application and said that you're 12 stone and actually at the medical you weigh in at 14 stone, that's just going to completely change everything that you've been anticipating to receive in terms of the pricing, so it really doesn't help the situation if we don't say what it should be. So, again, you would have the similar situation.

The insurer would turn on and say to you, "Right, if we had known your weight when you'd settled the policy, we would have offered you this amount of insurance at this price, so you can either keep paying next a higher price and keep that level of insurance and make up the premiums that amounts that we've been missing, or you can keep paying the same price and reduces them assured it's completely up to you when you're looking at something like that. So basically the key thing with the negligence is your actual answer would have resulted in different terms, such as a higher premium or an exclusion. Okay, now the deliberate one. So, this is where you know you should have answered differently, and you know this. I'm going to give some examples. They might seem quite extreme examples. I don't know if they will do or not, but it's worth, obviously, me covering them, so and there are actually, when it, when it comes to deliberate, I have to say, though, it is actually, it does tend to be more the extreme examples, and, and you know, so it's hard to give examples, because I wouldn't ever want it to seem, you know, if someone's been in this situation as if it's there's any kind of judgment or things like that, so everybody has their own reasons as to why they would do certain things, but also it does mean that I would be using examples that are quite emotive, so let's just be, I'm just going to try and be really careful with the examples I give here, so deliberate, so alcohol would be a really specific one here, so you're drinking 40 units of alcohol a week, which might sound, when you say 40 units of alcohol, might sound like quite a lot, and which, in the grand scheme of things, it is higher than what would be medically advised, and that's even from the British, the BMA, so British Medical Association, but it's actually quite easy for people to get to 40 units, whether or not that is, you know, having a bottle of wine or not every night, or having a really, really good night out on a Saturday after work, it's, it can be done, and you have been told by the GP to consider cutting down, you know, your alcohol consumption. It's not being like you've not needed a referral to any kind of alcohol support system. There's been no indication that you've got any concerns with your liver, and there's no indication that you've got any kind of an addiction. It's just your GPS said, you know, actually, that's that's high. So, will you know if they ask you about alcohol, and you're above what's now 14 units is the recommended allowance, and they will say to you, as part and parcel of their role, you know, well, you should consider reducing 14 anyway.

Kathryn Knowles 33:31

Let's say you have 40 units, GP said that to you, but you tell the insurer that you drink 20 units a week and had no advice to reduce, because they will ask about units of alcohol with most insurers, and they usually will ask about any kind of advice as well, and that will be seen as deliberate, you know, you're drinking more, you know that the GP has told you that, and you've deliberately said you're drinking a lot less, and that would be a situation where we would pretty confidently assume that it would be voided, so cancel from inception. And then we've also got sorry, the next one, so things like outstanding tests and investigations that you have now. An outstanding test and investigation will usually mean that an insurer, if they know about it at application stage, will generally say they want you to have that investigation, and for to be completed, and the results to be known before they will consider your application, which can be frustrating, but that is better than saying no, I haven't got anything, so as an example, you've gone to see your GP, and so this is actually an example that we are very, very familiar with.

It happened to somebody that we had been supporting, unfortunately, and so we had obviously gone through the applications that we'd asked all. All the questions that you ask, you say about being open, you know. Have you had any of these appointments? Are you outstanding any investigations? And the person speaking to us had said no. And unfortunately, it was a horrible situation. Unfortunately, the person passed away, and they did pass away from cancer, and the insured didn't pay the claim, and we were kicking off like mad. We were absolutely kicking off at the insurer, and unfortunately, what ended up resulting was, is that from when the client had done the application with us, and we'd asked those questions within a week before they did the application with us, they had spoken to their GP about some discomfort that they'd had, and the GP had said to them, we need to refer you, because it could be, it could be cancer. So, in this situation, I honestly, as well, think in that situation, that in some, in many ways, that person didn't do it deliberately.

I think that they had compartmentalized what was happening, and for them had genuinely answered that no, because they had blocked it, but unfortunately that that would be considered to be deliberate, because it is something that you are, you should have reasonably been aware that it should have been a yes to that question set, so the key thing with that is that you know you should have given a different answer, and the underwriting outcome would have been a postponement or a decline, that would be generally where they would say it was deliberate and without care. Another area for this would be things like sports, so riding a motorbike, a lot of insurers ask about it. Say, do you ride a motorbike? And you know, you might think I better say no, because if not going to put the price up, some insurers are absolutely going to put the price up if you ride a motorbike, but not all insurers ask about it. So, in many ways, find the insurer that doesn't ask about motorbikes, that's the simple solution. And there's lots and lots of examples like that as well, but I think that probably gives some really good background as to what we might be seeing, and when people say, you know, well, insurers don't pay us, I mean, the majority of insurers in the protection insurance space are, I think, on average, well over on 97% or higher in terms of claim success rate for things like life insurance, critical illness cover, the times that they don't pay out are for there were a number of different reasons, and I would absolutely say there's certainly times when the insurers are not perfect and don't get it right, and that things need to be challenged and stuff like that, but they do pay out millions, you know, hundreds of millions a year in these insurances.

Kathryn Knowles 37:49

They really do pay out, so the times that they don't tend to pay out are where the policies actually ended and somebody hasn't realized and they've tried to make a claim, where the person hasn't kept up to date with their payments, so maybe somebody hasn't paid their premiums for a good nine months or so, and then unfortunately they passed away. Well, during that time period, the insurer would have closed the policy down, because if you're not paying for it, they won't keep it active. There has been some really extenuating circumstances where insurers have still honored the claim, even though the policy hasn't been paid and been paid into, but that is very, very individual circumstance, and it was very, very, very much an extenuating circumstances, the ones that come to the top of my mind, and then the other one is this situation where people have non-disclosed, and that would be more on the where it's the deliberate or without care, because again, if it was the negligent, if it was innocent, if it was innocent, they pretty much have a duty to still honor the claim in terms of being treating customers fairly.

If it was negligent, then what they would possibly do is say, look, if we'd known everything, you know, we would say that, you know, that example again of, you know, sort of, if we'd known, instead of, if you're paying 15 pound a month, instead of 100,000 we'd have given you 85,000 so what we're going to do is do a claim of 85,000 not the full 100 that the family was expecting, or that you were expecting, if it was something like critical illness cover, and so obviously just bear that in mind. So, when they don't pay out, it is where there has been something that they, they really didn't know about, and so these issues don't usually come to light until the claim, just as examples in the last thing that anybody wants to be facing is for either yourself or for a loved one to be trying to go through a claim, which isn't a nice process at all. And obviously, so I've been very open. My mum passed away about three and a half months ago now, and there was no insurances in place, which is. Absolutely fine, because there was, there was enough, you know, in terms of things to be able to do funeral and things like that, and whatever was needed, but with everything that I had to deal with from an administration side of things, because obviously, again, I've been open, so it's not just my mom's past, my dad has Parkinson's and dementia, and she was his full-time carer, so I've had to step in and sort all of that side of things for him as well.

I couldn't be bothered to be doing an insurance claim, an argument and insurer at the same point. Now, I mean, insurance have tried, and they are trying to do as much as possible to improve the claims process, you know, they try and do everything as digital as possible now, and they try, and you know, once the claims with them, they try and have it paid, you know, within a very short, short period of time, wherever is humanly possible. So, having things like insurances in trust that massively helps the situation, all that kind of thing. But anyway, I'm digressing. But anyway, so the last thing we want a point of claim is for these discrepancies to be happening. We need the information to be matching your, essentially your medical records. That's the really, really key thing, that is where the insurers are potentially going to look into question about things. So we want to make sure that it's accurate, so I, that's one of the reasons that I actually really like it when insurers do go for GP reports for my clients, because then we know we know exactly that the insurer has seen everything in your medical records up to this date, so the likelihood of them being able to say you didn't tell us everything is really, really incredibly low, because they, what else could they have? They've got the medical records right there in front of them.

Kathryn Knowles 41:46

So I am a massive advocate of, I actually quite happy when the GP records are called for, but this can also lead to another issue that we do see, and in many ways it's even more of a reason why seeing a GP record is, is really a positive, is that we see lots of errors in GP records and things that are just in there that just are not accurate, often around things like alcohol, actually, and like it might say we had something very, very recently at Cure, where there was someone where they'd gone to the GP just because I think it was that they'd signed up to a new GP, and it was just part and parcel of the GP practice to go through everything as they do when they're onboarding somebody and say, oh, here's just some guidance, make sure you don't drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week, things like that, and from the GP report they ensures us that we should advise to reduce, and it's like, no, she hasn't. She's literally signed up for the GP surgery, and they've given her, they've gone through the standard process. No, it says here.

And then we had to get a letter from the GP to confirm, no, that's not the instance case at all. I was literally just going through my procedures to say that make sure you don't drink more than 14 units, there's no concern about alcohol here at all. Now, the difference, you might think, oh, well, you know, it's a bit, yeah, it's just one of those things. But how do you correct that in 20 years' time? When we're talking about these insurance products, we are talking about things that are being set up often for 20, 3040, years, some of them are whole of life in 20 years time, if there was a claim on it, how is it so I could touch what it won't happen, but let's say there was a claim for me, how would, if there's an error in my GP reports, how would my husband be able to debate that and argue and say, well, no, she wasn't drinking heavily, and didn't show, I was just going to say, well, it says it, the doctor that I was probably seeing at that point is probably retired and no longer there, so new doctors are going to be like, well, I can't put my name to it to say she wasn't drinking, because I didn't even know her, so it's really, really tricky, and it is important because it is important to get those records corrected, and not only, obviously, I mean, from an insurance point of view, yes, it's important, but just generally as well for your health and for your well-being, if you, for some reason, end up in hospital and your medical records are wrong, and things like that, then you might not get the treatment that you need, or it might be done in a slightly different way than it should be, because of an inaccurate record, and that's I always like to say, as well, that is not me NHS bashing at all, the NHS is absolutely wonderful, and it took such good care of my mum.

It's taking such good care of my dad. I am here. I would say the reason I'm alive is because of the NHS, because of all the different things that I've experienced and gone through, and different stuff like that. And so it is an absolutely phenomenal organization, but there are errors in record keeping, and it is massively underfunded. So, it's certainly not a criticism of anybody who works in the NHS, and also, as well, sometimes it is really, really easy to just tap the wrong code, and we've had. Before, with people, where there's literally like one code next to the other, the wrong ones tapped, so you can just also get human error sometimes, but really important to double check that. So I personally highly advocate that, especially when you are going for insurance, you know, log into your NHS app, log on to whatever you can do, whatever systems your GP provides, and try and access your medical records, double check, you know, again, that thing of anything in the last two, three years.

Kathryn Knowles 45:24

We'll just have a look back, so it might only be that the records go back that far that you can access, and but just make sure that what's in there is what you think, and to your knowledge, what should be in there. And another last thing, in terms of the under disclosure from an advisor point of view is, you know, if you're going through an application with a client over the phone, and you know you can really pick up on any kind of, if there's any means or havings to the answers, you can say, well, look, do you want to just chat through that, so that you know we can, I can help you decide if it needs to go in there or not, and but there's a lot of things happening now with delegate access, where we, as advisors, set up the application, but then hand it over electronically to the client to complete themselves at a time and place it suits them, which really it's works for a lot of people who've been very, very busy, and then they pass it back to us before it goes back to the insurer, and so we can check it over.

What I would say as advice is just make sure you really check it over, especially for that under disclosure side of things. So I had something not long ago where I was supporting somebody, and it was I was reviewing a cover, I was doing new cover, so I'd known about their disclosures from the previous time I delegated the app, app came in, checking it over, and I noticed that one of the disclosures was missing, and again it was innocent, really innocent compared to the time frames and what I've been asked, and things like that. It's just because I was being quite vigilant, obviously, that I was able to spot it, and so I changed it, and before I submitted it, I said to the client, like, I'm just letting you know, I've changed this answer to this. Are you happy for me to submit it with that answer? Because obviously you do need to have their permission still to submit any changes, and you know, straight, it was like, oh yeah, absolutely, completely didn't even realize on the time frames. Now that would be an innocent non-disclosure, I know it would be, because of the situation that I'm referring to with it, but it's just better to avoid it.

We just don't want to have anything like that at all. It would be a lot of headache at claim stage that we can avoid if possible. So, basically, under disclosure, don't do it. So, let's try our best not to do it, and just bear in mind for people who are obviously uncertain about insurers and their willingness to pay out claims and stuff like that. Look at the stats as to what they do pay out, and I'm talking about protection insurance here, so that's your life insurance, your criticalness income protection. I'm not talking about other insurances, because I don't work in that space. That's in a sense, it's almost like a different industry to what we work in, and so I don't know all the stats there, but you know, it takes a lot for an insurer to go. We are going to say this is deliberate. We are just not going to pay out at all. They will look at alternatives, they will try and make it work for the person before the jump to that step. And so, you know, don't panic. And, but if you ask somebody who has maybe answered a question you're not sure about it, then I'd say just reach out to an advisor, you know, there's many, many advisors in the UK who would be able to review answers that you've given in an application set and make sure that it's all done correctly, and yeah, hopefully, hopefully we can really do steps to make sure everything goes right for people throughout the whole process of getting it submitted right through to that claim stage. So, thank you for listening, everybody. Next time, Alan is going to be back with me, and we're going to be doing another deep dive into a medical disclosure that is yet to be decided.

Kathryn Knowles 48:53

So, if you have any disclosures that you would like us to go over, let me know within the next week or so, and we will do our best to cover it, you can visit the website practical-protection.co.uk to access all of our episodes, as well as all podcast platforms, and also your CPD certificates. And that is a big thank you to Planner X, who sponsors and provide those certificates. Thank you, everybody. Speak soon.

Transcript Disclaimer:

Episodes of the Practical Protection Podcast include a transcript of the episode's audio. The text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record.

We often discuss health and medical conditions in relation to protection insurance and underwriting, always consult with a healthcare professional if you are concerned about any medical conditions and symptoms we have covered in any episode.

Episodes

Kathryn Knowles is discussing overdisclosure in protection insurance
Episode 12 – Overdisclosure

May 28, 2026

Kathryn Knowles and Alan Knowles, discussing protection insurance underwriting for fatty liver disease
Episode 11 – Fatty Liver Disease

May 14, 2026

Kathryn Knowles is sharing her personal story of having LPAs for her parents, that were invaluable when tragedy struck
Episode 10 – The Value of Lasting Powers of Attorney

April 30, 2026

Kathryn Knowles is talking about the FCA Protection Market Study Interim Report
Episode 9 – FCA Protection Market Study Interim Report

February 19, 2026

Kathryn Knowles is discussing how to support vulnerable clients when advising on protection insurance
Episode 8 – Vulnerable Clients

February 5, 2026

Episode 7 – Weight Loss Drugs

January 22, 2026

Kathryn Knowles and Alan Knowles discussing Neurofibromatosis and Life Insurance
Episode 6 – Neurofibromatosis

December 11, 2025

Kathryn Knowles discussing FCA Protection Paper
Episode 5 – FCA Protection Paper

November 27, 2025

Kathryn Knowles discussing Cystic Fibrosis
Episode 4 – Cystic Fibrosis

November 13, 2025

Kathryn Knowles discussing Critical Illness Cover in Trust
Episode 3 – Critical Illness Cover in Trust

October 23, 2025