Scottish Widows: Critical Illness Cover

The Product

Scottish Widows has introduced a number of changes to the critical illness elements of its Protect plan including:

• Simplification. The number of definitions has been reduced from 49 to 40 by combining similar definitions. For example, 16 of the previous definitions have been reduced to just five. Cover is now wider as conditions such as heart failure have been added.
• As the top ten conditions account for 96.3% of Scottish Widows’ claims, it has widened the scope of key definitions, concentrating on the two most common areas of claim – cancer and heart.
• A Booster Payment for selected neurological conditions is included for customers aged 45 or under. They get an enhanced payment of 150% of their current sum insured up to a maximum of £200,000.
• Advanced payment for surgical procedures has been added. Rather than waiting for the surgery to be completed, the plan now pays out an advance payment of the current amount of cover if the customer is on a UK waiting list for treatment, whether for NHS or private treatment.
• There is an increased payout for additional payments and children’s cover. The maximum payout has been increased from £25,000 to £30,000 for children’s critical illness cover. For children’s life cover the payout has been increased from £5,000 to £10,000.
• Child cover is now extended to all main and additional conditions except for TPD.
• The survival period for main conditions has been reduced from 14 days to ten days and removed completely for additional payments.
• Product literature. To help bring definitions to life in the product literature, the 30 main conditions have now been grouped together in five easy to understand headings using a ‘body image’ concept. The five are: heart and arteries; organs; senses; brain and neurological, and cancer. The Policy Summary is accredited by Fairer Finance as using clear design and simple language.

Overall, Protect is a menu style plan, with each type of cover written as a legally separate entity, so making any future cover changes easier.

What They Say

Protection specialist Johnny Timpson said: "Scottish Widows promised Dr Marius Barnard that we would strive to make critical illness insurance as accessible and simple as possible, focusing on the conditions that give rise to the majority of claims and paying as many of them as we can. The enhancements that we have announced are another milestone in delivering on that promise."

What We Say

"The simplification of CI is very much an ongoing process and has now taken over (to some extent) from the previous trend of the ‘conditions race’ – just adding (and counting) more and more conditions. One element of simplification is combining similar conditions into one, broader, condition. "Scottish Widows has gone further, by grouping the 30 major conditions into just five broad condition areas in its literature. On its own, that’s a very small point, but I’d highlight it because the art of simplicity is not so much dumbing down or reducing cover (why would you want to do that?) as better explaining the what’s and why’s and grouping similar things wherever possible. Widows’ ‘body image’ concept is brilliantly simple – and you wonder why no one has thought to do this before! "None of this is at the expense of the cover offered (except for HIV which, in common with other insurers, is no longer covered). For example, there is a new, lower, decibel threshold on the deafness condition and the survival period has been cut to just ten days. "Overall, cover is now wider (and children’s cover usefully improved too) and should be easier for clients to understand. Just don’t try counting and comparing the number of conditions covered these days – today’s best CI plans are Tardis-like, as they cover much more than just a simple number count might expect you to believe. However, to be able to understand how different providers compare, you increasingly need to refer to third party analysts such as CI Expert or Protection Guru."