Income protection claims from the self-employed having accidents are starting to rise with one insurer now reviewing its historic claims data to identify low risk jobs.
Naomi Ballantyne, Managing Director of Partners Life, expected there would be an increase in depression claims as the job landscape changed due to government lockdowns, but with the nation’s employment figures currently looking better than expected, she was reconsidering her forecast.
“But we are now starting to see an increase in claims caused by accidents, with the medical profession listing mental health as a complicating factor in the degree of disability,” she said during a video conference.
“And the really interesting thing is almost 100 percent of those claims are for self-employed clients, who in all probability will be financially better off on claim than they would be going back to work, because of the agreed value of their benefits.”
Ballantyne says the firm is doing its best to help all its clients, but is undertaking a review of claims from the self-employed to establish if any occupations lead to more claims than others.
“We’ve assumed an increase in depression claims in our book,” she says. “But we are currently doing further analysis of our self-employed agreed value claims over the years to see if we can narrow down the specific customer groups who are causing that significant distortion, as well as claims outcomes for self-employed customers versus employed customers.
“So in other words, are there specific types of occupations that are more problematic than others? And if there are, can we ease out the ones that are not problematic away from the [policy] restrictions and really only apply them where they are really needed.”