Rob Harvey: So last month we covered as one of the topics the language in communications and the way that language is used in protection products in their marketing and the need to avoid jargon and these sorts of things. And one of the things that came off of that was more of a focus on underwriting. I suspect that a lot of us maybe aren’t completely clued up on what’s been going on, and some of the initiatives have been going on in the background, particularly looking at underwriting and the way that the language used around underwriting and improvements to not necessarily underwriting processes, but the way that consumers understand underwriting what those processes are. And also importantly as well when non-standard terms are applied, when applications are declined, the way that that’s communicated to consumers.

This is something that a lot of insurers I understand have been undertaking reviewing making improvements to their underwriting processes. But I think this is as important for advisers as well, particularly in view of the fact that it will often be advisers that are delivering those outcomes and those terms to clients. They’re actually more involved in the underwriting process sometimes than the insurer themselves.

Last year, in December, the Access to Insurance working group came up with an industry commitment to improve the way that underwriting decisions are explained where there’s non-standard terms or where an applications declined entirely. And that’s really been about trying to improve trust in understanding underwriting process amongst advisers and their clients, and then setting out some best practises around how non-standard decisions are communicated to clients.

And they’ve come up with some details as part of that agreement, ways in which underwriting decisions should be communicated, avoiding technical jargon, broad explanations of what underwriting is and how it works. And there’s some responsibilities as well here for distributors in terms of signposting, alternative options and these sorts of things. So what I’m going to do is turn to some experts who can just set the scene a little bit for us.

Peter Hamilton: As Rob said, it is a really important part of what we collectively do. So, A, it’s important, B, it’s a journey. It’s not a destination. So I will just try and give a little bit of context, as Rob has suggested I might do in terms of where we might be now. But really just to emphasise, I don’t know that we’ll ever get there and get it perfect. But I think we can point to some really good progress over the last couple of years.

And as Rob indicates, there’s probably a couple of main threads that have driven some of the industry oversight as it were of the way that insurers are working here. One is from the ABI and one is from the Access to Insurance Group. And actually, there’s quite a lot of commonality between the two, which is worth drawing out. So the APBI’s main intervention here has been within the last 12 months.

But coming on from an earlier discussion from the back end of 2019 with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, just looking at how those with mental health get access to insurance and some of the difficulties that they find when they do that. So the ABI introduced at the beginning of 2021 for implementation by the end of 2021… So basically, all of us within the ABI should now be complying with these mental health insurance standards. And just to give you a few headlines in terms of what it covers, that there are four overall headings.

There is improving accessibility, there’s the application process, there’s communicating decisions and then there’s transparency. So this is a code that draws out best practise in this area. So for example, in terms of improving accessibility, there’s things that ABI members will be expected to do and it’s up to you, as advisers here start to be judging us.

And certainly from a Zurich perspective, and I’m sure other provider colleagues will be very open to that challenge. If you think, as I talk through briefly some of the things, [that there are things] that we should be doing that we’re not doing, then you need to start to highlight that to us. So part of it in terms of access is giving customers more choices in terms of how we communicate with them and making those choices clear. We do need to have put in place clear support processes as well.

So I think all of us will have vulnerability protocols and more to deal with. But also, we’ll all have gone through material, additional training to help our frontline staff understand some of the issues they might face. And I would say for anyone who’s not aware of part of the packages of work that the ABI delivered here was a training module. In fact, three training modules, all of which are free and are applicable just as much to advisers as to insurers.

So it’s just the things to be alert to. It wasn’t developed by the ABI per se, they paid for it, but it was developed by a company called Right Steps. So if anyone hasn’t heard of it or hasn’t seen it, I’ll pop a link in the chat later on. But here’s free access to training driven by the ABI as part of this process, but put together by people who absolutely know what the issues are. There’s an application process. So we are challenged to look at our underwriting questions and to manage expectations through the process. So are we being clear what we’re using this information for, why we’re using it? We should be asking questions in a way that doesn’t demand prior medical knowledge or understanding. So we ought to be looking for things that have relevant mental health conditions and treatments.

But I’ll link specifically to outcomes or severity as well. And also, the way we package together questions. What we shouldn’t be doing is putting in one question a whole range of relatively mild conditions together with some very serious conditions where it’s almost hard to say what you’re saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to. So, challenges in terms of the questions that we have.

Then in terms of the coverage, part of it is just clarity and empathy. So a lot of encouragement to really understand the language that we’re using. For example, we won’t be using the word ‘decline,’ and that might seem a simple thing to do.

But insurers will have their own form of words. But rather than a very blunt, potentially distressing, “We’re just declining you,” which is almost impossible not to sound negative. We’ll be talking about things like, “we’re unable to offer cover at this time,” but also within that then to signpost elsewhere to potentially other insurers or back to advisers to say, “even if we can’t offer cover at this time, there may well be opportunities for you to get cover elsewhere.”

And then transparency. So if the customer wants to understand more just how we have come to a decision, then they should be able to ask us. So that is expressly in relation to mental health. But actually the lessons learnt as the ABI went through this process, are applicable pretty much to most conditions. So the logic of being clear why you want information, how are you going to use it, how you explain your decisions isn’t just a mental health issue. So that’s allied with a separate bit of work that went on in parallel, but actually has a lot of echoes.

And that was the work from the Access to Insurance Group, which did a lot, for example– and I think most people on the call would be familiar with– signposting. So if you can’t do it yourself as an adviser, to signpost to somebody else. If we can’t offer cover as an insurer, either make that clear back to the adviser or if it’s a direct case then we should be signposting to someone else who can provide the cover if we can’t. So that’s part of a separate voluntary agreement that pretty much all insurers signed up to again at the end of last year. And I’ve written down that, for example, within this commitment, it’s that we will be empathetic, respectful, free of stigmatising language, and appropriate.

So in all our communications, we just need to reflect back and say, “Are we doing that?” We need to clearly state what exclusions are and make that very apparent in terms of any playback of terms. And there is an additional part in terms of explaining why we’ve come to a decision. Now this is on request and I think there will have been some debate at the time around “could we do it in more detail in every case?”

I think the ultimate aim must be to do that, but inevitably quite a lot of the way our decisions are communicated will be through existing online underwriting systems, which bring great benefits in terms of speed of process and more. But some of the dis-benefits are inevitably, you’ve got fixed wording coded into some of these systems.

So over time, I think we will see these systems more and more be used more intuitively to present to customers a rationale for a decision that goes beyond simply for medical reasons, for height and weight, for BMI or whatever it might be. But even though the systems today can’t all go into a granular level of detail, it is absolutely open to advisers or to customers to come back to the underwriters and say, “Tell me more about why that decision has been made.”

And as much as anything else, that’s to help the advisers then say, “OK, you’ve told us that it’s badly managed diabetes or whatever it might be. Therefore, I’ve got a better idea as to what the issue is with you, Company XYZ, and therefore I will now be better informed in terms of taking that business case for the next company.” So I think we have made collectively a lot of progress over the last 18 months here.

Absolutely, knowing at the same time that it’s not going to be perfect and I would encourage certainly, particularly during Zurich cases if people feel that we are not communicating well or that we’re unclear, come back to me directly and I’ll feed that through. From a broader industry point of view, I represent a number of ABI’s committees, but also the Access to Insurance. So again, I’m happy to listen to any advisers out there who we want to talk to me about ways we can build on the good work that’s been done so far. So I’ll stop there, Adam, and let your other guests carry on and then I’m happy to pick up any kind of debate or questions after that, if that helps.

Jack Southcott: For us at the Exeter that there was also a bit of an impact on health insurance as well as well as protection insurance. And as Peter was saying, I think the majority of the standards, the 13 or so that they were covered under the four main headlines, the majority we were pretty compliant with already.

To the point Peter made about making sure that what you’re questioning is linked to an outcome– that meant that we had to make a change on our health insurance journey. Not so our protection application journey, but on one of our health insurance plans. We have a mental health add-on. But despite that, we asked the mental health questions for all customers, not just those that were selecting it. So that was a change we did to defaulting the answers. And that’s very much like, you shouldn’t be asking it if it’s not going to be linked to an outcome in the application.

So that’s one of the changes we made. Otherwise, the main thing for us is around the language and removing ‘declining,’ ‘declinature.’ And so that was stripped out of all of our comms with customers by the end of the year. Culturally, it’s something that we’re just trying to embed now across the company because you expect that word’s been around a long time and it’s going to be something that’s used in spoken language amongst the employees, amongst the underwriting team and everything. So that’s just something that we’re trying to embed, as well as just embedding the rest of the standards.

As you’ve mentioned, Rob, it was a mental health focus. But actually, it just makes sense that if you’re removing that, that language for one condition, you do it for all. So it’s a case of removing that for all conditions now out of underwriting guides, data capture forms everywhere that it might have been previously. So that’s what we’ve done at the Exeter.

Rob Harvey: I suppose, are there other elements of the underwriting questionnaire underwriting process that that you’ve changed as well or that you were doing already that meet those standards?

Jack Southcott: That was a specific standard, the point around removing language such as ‘declining.’ So that was quite a clear one that the insurers were asked to adhere to. But I think also one of the standards was around regularly reviewing your communications, and that’s something that we commit to as a company and as an underwriting team to always be reviewing the types of language we use. We do that with the reinsurers as well to make sure that we are using the right language.

As I said, we’re not using language that would not be recognised by any person that might be coming across one of these application forms. So it’s rather than focussing on more specific words, it’s more a commitment that we that we’re regularly reviewing them and making sure they’re the right sort of language to be using.

Rob Harvey: And as Peter alluded to, one of the things was what we touched upon this last month about trying to remove jargon and technical language as well, which consumers and often advisers don’t understand. And so it can be challenging, sometimes explaining those decisions.

Peter Hamilton: One of the other things that we have reflected on is a kind of challenge, that individuals might have heard insurers saying, “Well, you’ve got to see your doctor about that.” It’s really important that we own the decisions that we take and it’s not the reinsurers, it’s the insurers. We’re making the decision. We need to own the decision.

I think there had been an implication that periodically we were somehow avoiding this and saying, “if you want to know why we made the decision go and see your doctor.” So that should never be happening. I think the only times in which we might be referring someone to a doctor is where, for example, a medical report has highlighted something that wasn’t disclosed on the application form. We can’t, simply through data protection reasons, disclose that without additional formal consent from the customer to the adviser. So we might need to occasionally refer the customer back for further explanation of a particular condition, but not to the decision.

So the decision is down to us. If the customer needs more information… And I suspect when we do get calls back from customers to our underwriters, the kind of things that is driving customers is largely things like “what does the doctor know that I don’t know? What are they not told me?” So I think there’s an underlying fear there that we’ve discovered something that they don’t know about. So part of it is ultimately, if we redirect to the doctor at all, it’s giving that reassurance that they know as much as the doctor knows. But that is the sort of thing that I think will understandably cause some people some anxiety.

Rob Harvey: And does that still happen if the clinic or the underwriting decision is based on the results of, say, a medical screening or a nurse examination that the client wasn’t aware of? Because I just I know from my own experience, I had a number of clients that did find out via screenings that they had things that they didn’t previously know about. And so naturally, it wasn’t my job as an adviser or indeed the insurer, perhaps, to be informing them of something that they maybe didn’t know.

Peter Hamilton: I think in those examples… We can’t explain the doctor’s report, as it were, we can say the decision is due to information that has been presented on the report. But for more detail of that condition, I think that’s where we’d have to ask the GPs to step in, but not to explain why it’s a decline or rating or anything like that. It’s to say “this is what’s been found on the evidence that you’ve sent through.”

Alan Knowles: I’ll start with the language and the education piece. So we’re a big advocate of getting education on language and what we describe as ‘etiquette’ when we’re speaking to people who I’d say, people who are living with disabilities, but actually, it’s almost anybody now, isn’t it? Anyone who’s got some sort of a disclosure of some form.

And it’s actually amazing, once you start to delve into this you realise how many words and phrases you use that actually could potentially be offensive or that could upset somebody or that could trigger an emotional reaction in somebody. And this isn’t just related to mental health in itself, it’s related to potentially all sorts of conditions. And I’ll give you a few examples. As everyone probably knows my bugbear with the phrase ‘impaired lives.’ The amount of times I see that phrase thrown about.

I had an insurer email me last week and say, “I’m sorry, we don’t deal with impaired lives.” And that was an insurer who was just looking to underwrite somebody. So how would you determine at what point somebody is classed as ‘impaired?’ And also, that actually means damaged and broken? And so what are you really saying about that person? But there’s other phrases that we use as well.

And if I pull on the mental health side specifically, the phrase ‘commit suicide’ is used a lot by so many people– it actually refers to a crime. So, it’s a phrase that we shouldn’t be using. And if you speak to any mental health charity, they would cringe at the use of that word. Yet people stand up in presentations and use it because it’s part of our language. It’s part of what we maybe grew up and knew. But actually, it’s something that can alienate people who have tried to take their own life, so there are better ways to phrase it.

Wheelchair bound is another example– it’s actually really insulting someone who is a wheelchair user, but yet it is still used. Underwriters will use this when we speak to them: “Are they bound to the wheelchair?” And I’m sorry, but they should know better. And now that might not happen all the time, but advisers use it as well. So, this whole education piece we’re talking about mental health is really, really important.

And I think probably just to clarify that as well that actually, people who do use wheelchairs, it’s their freedom. It’s how they get out in the same way that somebody who isn’t a wheelchair user uses their leg. So actually, to say they’re ‘bound to it’ is a really negative phrase.

And I’m not saying that these go out on decline letters, by the way. I’ve never seen phrases like this put in a decline letter, which obviously is positive. But the fact we still use them as an industry, and quite regularly, is to me quite a big deal because it impacts all of our thinking and it creates a culture that we should be moving away from. Everybody lives with something or everyone will have probably some form of disability or medical condition at some point.

So, we don’t suffer from conditions– we live with conditions. It’s not the disabled– it’s people who live with disabilities. All these sorts of phrases can make a huge, huge difference. But my point on that is, education is really important. And the ABI sort of test, I want to say, or resource online where you can do the research and almost do that course is a really good start. But I’d encourage any adviser, anyone, to go further than that and to try and improve the knowledge on this as well.

My experience from the communication side in the transparency is that on mental health, I think we are definitely getting better. It was only a couple of years ago when we actually pulled an insurance company for having… When you search for ‘mental health’ or you search for ‘depression’ or you search for different conditions because you’ve made a disclosure and they actually had ‘mental retardation’ on there, which, obviously took me by absolute shock when we saw that that was on there. Yet they didn’t have quite basic disclosures like a personality disorder, for example.

So, this whole point about working with mental health charities is so, so important and regularly reviewing the right wording and the right things to be asking. Another thing that we’ve seen, I guess massive improvements on, is we’ve seen a lot of improvements around the mental health questions. And overall, I think this is really positive.

I guess a few examples are: how long ago was it when you disclosed mental health, you went through the mental health questions, but then you disclosed IBS and then asked you the mental health questions are then and then you maybe disclosed a suicide attempt and actually you were then made to do them again. So you would actually end up asking the questions three times to the client and one of the golden rules of this is: don’t make people repeat themselves. Especially when they’re having to re-live something that’s potentially really traumatic. So I think as an industry, we’ve really moved on with that. And whether that was happening in any way or a part of the mental health standard I don’t know, but it’s helping.

Another positive side is around actually some of the language that’s being used around these mental health disclosures and also time frames as well. So to pull a few examples, AIG now only ask about actual attempts and self-harm in the last 10 years. They’re not going to ask about somebody who maybe had issues as a child, for example, thirty years ago.

Scottish Widows, in the last five years ago. Aviva actually differentiate now between a suicidal thought and an actual plan. So if someone’s had a thought, then they don’t ask about it in the last six months. LV=, for example, don’t ask about anything unless you’ve been hospitalised, and then they only ask about actual thoughts that you’ve sought help for.

All this has come, I think, as a result of the mental health standards and people looking into this in more depth, which is really positive. I do still find it surprising that some insurance companies ask about and I’ll use this as an example, but a suicidal thought, forever. Actually, they must have the highest nondisclosure rate out of anybody because who’s not had some sort of a thought go through the head, even fleeting at some point?

And I don’t see how that can be a valid question. And then even when you say “yes,” then “how many thoughts have you had? How many times have you experienced this?” Who can say that? Really, it’s a silly question and actually does it… Going back to that point about asking questions to determine an outcome. What’s the point in asking something about 30 years ago? And that’s not going to affect your decision. If that’s irrelevant, then don’t ask the question.

So I think there’s still work to be done, but I wanted to flag that there have been some really good examples of this. Underwriting accessibility, I think life insurance is getting better. Royal London are really good example with a mental health pilot, obviously, it’s still quite pilot, it’s still quite restricted. But a very, very good example of how we can do something different to help people in the sense.

Aviva had a really good example a year or two ago where they said “we won’t decline anybody online who has a mental health disclosure, we will refer it. We will review it manually. We’ll look at it case by case.” Excellent example of: you get your client maybe who had three attempts to take their own life 30 years ago. Well, some insurers will still decline that online because they’ll say, “well, actually two or more is an instant decline.”

That’s a very hard message. And you go back to that communication point of that message to the client, say, “sorry, we won’t cover you because of your attempts to take your own life.” However, you dress that up online. That’s not an easy thing to then read and can be quite triggering.

So, referring it and actually looking at it, having a human look at it, read over it, maybe contact for more information, is really important.

Where we need more work– income protection, without a doubt. I’ve got two good examples here. I think women who have given birth and maybe speak to the doctors and maybe have a note of post-partum depression and maybe talk about low mood, etc. after they’ve after they’ve given birth and then see mental health exclusions as a result? Well, it’s quite a difficult place. It’s very difficult time for anybody who’s having new children. The fact that you talk to your doctors, etc., is actually a positive thing. But that leads… it’s almost instant straight to an exclusion.

Most serious conditions like bipolar, they just get overlooked so often. Somebody who lives with bipolar, knows their mental health and can be extremely proactive about it. But yet it’s almost impossible for someone bipolar to get income protection. There’s only a couple of providers who will even entertain it on a case by case basis. So Emma said earlier that advisers speak to clients and we can tell people and we can explain why a decision might not be available.

And one thing that a lot of people probably don’t realise is part of the transparency agreement that the Access to Insurance Group put forward last year is that with an appropriately signed consent letter, the adviser can have that conversation with an insurance company.

So Peter just touched on that then. So, you know, we’ve got a really good example of that letter and to be honest, if anyone contacts me I’m happy to share it. I’m not saying that we can have that conversation every time, but it can put more information in our hands so we can have an empathetic conversation with our clients, especially with the type of relationship a good adviser would have with their clients.

Rob Harvey: To what extent do you think that actually this is something where there maybe needs to be some training, some standards, more work done in supporting advisers? Because I’m very conscious that lots of the people involved in the distribution of these products who are actually the people that are discussing this stuff with consumers don’t necessarily have any training. Do you think that there is a need for more emphasis on these standards being applied to distribution channels as well?

Alan Knowles: Yes, 100 percent. And I think there is as much, if not more, onus on us because we have the direct relationship with the client. So obviously, we work mainly off referrals for people who have been declined or people who struggle to get protection.

The amount of times I have somebody email me and introduce a client and say, “Alan, let me introduce XYZ, they’re an impaired life.” And my hand just goes to my head and I think, “what the poor person must have felt like to have been introduced as an impaired life?” And they don’t think anything of it because it’ just using the industry jargon that’s already there. And it’s awful. But there are more subtle things like the “suffer from” or the “wheelchair-bound” or “commit suicide,” which actually people could really easily fall into those traps, but could actually trigger somebody or hurt someone or offend somebody as a result. I think it’s really important and probably equally so for advisers as it is for insurers.

Stacy Reeve: I was just thinking, Alan mentioned a D&I Guide as part of our work that we did on diversity and inclusivity. The company that we used for that have a great guide that details the different words and phrases and what’s seen as acceptable, what could be seen as insulting. And reading through that kind of helped me in the D&I conversations to have more confidence in the right words that I should be using.

And I just wondered whether it would be useful to have something similar. I know it’s quite an open-ended thing. I don’t know how hard it would be to try and collate, but it just feels like you’ve got all of this on the insurer side and like yourself and Alan have just said, it sits on the advisers as well to have that responsibility.

Rob Harvey: My fear is a lot of the good work that might be being done on the insurer side could potentially be undone if on the distribution side if those standards are somewhat lacking. And that’s not to say that that necessarily is happening, but I think what prompted today’s topic was a recognition that there are now thousands of people out there involved in the distribution of protection products. And there’s clearly going to be varying levels of quality in the way that that advice is delivered and the language that’s being used. And we do need to put this on because I think the work that’s been going on has been happening in the background and there’s been a little bit of coverage in that, but maybe it hasn’t got as much focus as other things on the distribution side.

Emma Astley: Alan that was great. It was just fantastic, you’re right. The mental health is a massive section of it at the moment. A lot of our clients are younger, busy mums, and it’s about having that conversation with them because a lot of them disclose mental health conditions, whether that be bipolar, PTSD that has been diagnosed just by traumatic births, the anxiety, the depression.

But it’s the questions in the application and actually understanding what the insurer needs is very important for us as advisers, because what they might say, “how many episodes of you had of that?” They’re not meaning like, “today I was really anxious or yesterday I was a bit pinged off.” That’s your day to day anxiety. The insurer wants to know the really bad days: they don’t want to get off the settee; they felt really crappy; they struggled to do the washing, the cooking, and picking the kids up from school.

I think as advisers, it’s important that the insurer can’t make a decision based on just what the application it is. So it’s important for us as advisers to email the insurer after with a journey of what that client’s been through. Like the lady that I had, who was unfortunately sexually abused and that led then into pregnancy. And then she was forced to go back to work a lot earlier than what she should and the separation from her partner. So she actually went through such a tough journey. And that was quite recent.

But when I explained that to the insurer, they then took her on an individual basis, understanding the circumstances around what she’d been through. And it was really good for me to then have that conversation with the client and give her an understanding of what I was going to do to help her, but also feed that back to the insurer so they could give us a really good decision for her.

So it’s important we know more and the insurers work with us to give us educational pieces on the underwriting process. What do they mean in the questions? And not repeating the question “how many times suicide that you’ve attempted?” Repeated. And that really annoys me when it says it at the beginning and then it also then says it when you do ‘disclose anxiety.’ So just there’s a lot really, isn’t there, on the mental health side. And I’d love to feedback many examples on our clients because there’s various different combinations of mental health that I think it’s interesting to look into because it’s becoming more and more- even before COVID– it’s becoming more and more common with our clients and disclosures.

Rob Harvey: I think you raise a perhaps a an interesting point there that obviously when you’re completing an application or something of a client, increasingly that is being funnelled down a kind of process where there’s different questions being triggered by different responses. But actually the advisers need to almost… you can’t just get in the zone of just asking those questions and ignoring everything else. You do need to be capturing information. We had somebody contact us recently asking to do a piece on, what do clients actually have to disclose as well? Because I think there’s perhaps also some uncertainty around, how much to the letter of that question does someone need to be?

We’ve been talking about mental health, but lots of insurers still ask how many episodes of back pain you’ve had in the last five years. And somebody might have had a thousand episodes of back pain in the last five years. But it doesn’t mean that they’ve got a back complaint. And it’s the same with the mental health questions and lots of different underwriting questions. It can be difficult to know exactly sort of how to answer those.

Robyn Allen: I think part of the problem, especially for advisers, and this is what Emma and everyone been talking a lot about is: when you take the time to really get to know your clients and we know their medical conditions ahead of time, we know what’s coming. Like, we know what we’ve got to ask them and we know we have to ask them as the question is there, because we want to make sure the most accurate answer is recorded in the way the insurer needs it or wants it so that the correct information is there.

And I’ll be honest, if I’ve got someone with a sensitive medical condition, I’m cringing every time because nobody words it very well at all at the minute. So I’m reading about saying we need industry standards, and we absolutely do, because why do some ask about when was the last time you ‘suffered with’ the condition versus when was the last time you ‘saw a health professional for a condition?’ Some will ask about ‘incidents of back pain’ and will clarify what they mean, but then others won’t. So then you’re trying to decipher it. And then because, “well, I didn’t see I didn’t see a doctor that time, so does it count?” And you’re sat there going, “umm… yes?”

Emma Astley: I think a great example from January is we noticed that an application had changed with an insurer and I was a bit taken back by the whole mental health changes and things like that, and I was quite curious. So I reached out to the insurer to ask them, “why have they changed it like this?”

Because I was interested to learn more for my clients because we were having the embarrassing conversations with like, “really sorry to ask this.” And I have a great relationship with my client and even I found it hard. So God knows how other advisers struggled with that. But we actually asked them, and they said they’d worked with a mental health charity, and this mental health charity had given feedback in regards to some of the people they were helping.

So that’s why they changed the application. But I actually then challenged it to say, “right, based on our client’s conversations and their mental health disclosures, this is how they find the wording. This is how it is triggering.” That is a big word at the moment within the youngsters. They find it really triggering that they’re being asked these questions and it does affect them. And actually, we’re in the process of still working with that insurer to get the applications amended to be more simple, more gentle, better wording. Because it is needed, it is needed. You’re still doing a really good job, by the way, with these applications and changes and the processes. And I will always bang on about that because I think the insurers have moved massively in the last few years on the mental health side. So hats off to you.

Robyn Allen: Emma actually reminded me of a case I was dealing with last year when we I had a client that had an eating disorder or a history of eating disorders. Which obviously gets put into the mental health category, which means that all of the questions primarily were around mental health and all of this. And when we finally came across an insurer that asked the question of: “has your menstrual cycle returned to normal?” My client cheered and went that’s the first time I’ve heard somebody ask a question that’s valid to my recovery. Because that was a key indicator of her being well. So at that point, she went, “we’re going with them.” She appreciated the terminology.

Scott Taylor-Barr: It was more from my own fear of getting it wrong than anything else, but I had a client that I spoke to who was ex-Navy, and at our first fact find meeting it became apparent that she left the services because of PTSD. So obviously, knowing we were going to do a protection application, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable and it concerned me.

So I actually rang up the charity Combat Stress, and I explained to them the situation and what I was about to do and just said, “Look, what do I need to know to make sure I approach this properly?” And they were brilliant. They were so helpful. And they said, “Do this ex-services, approach it like this. Use this terminology, be direct.”

But really gave me some really practical tips the best way to approach somebody in that situation. So I think sometimes we have to think a little bit sideways. Don’t just look at the industry and look at it and go, “right, which insurers can help me do this?” Look a little bit further afield as well and look at the support that’s out there. Maybe it might be a charity. It might be something else. But don’t just look internally at the insurance industry for the answers sometimes.

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