The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) does not know how many protection and health insurance customers are in the UK market, Health & Protection can reveal.
The regulator confirmed to Health & Protection that it does not have a record of the number of active protection and health insurance policies under its jurisdiction.
The results came from a Freedom of Information request submitted by Health & Protection to the FCA asking for the number of individual in-force policies for term life insurance, critical illness (CI), income protection (IP) and private medical insurance (PMI).
Firm level data only
In response, the regulator said it did not hold the information for the three protection policy types.
It noted that its supervision handbook required product sales data for only a limited number of product types.
“In addition, ‘policies in force’ data is provided by firms at a firm level rather than at product level,” it said.
“High level policy data for critical illness and income protection is published on our website,” it added.
These figures that were available showed 469,578 new critical illness policies, either as a rider or stand alone, were sold in 2021 – up almost 10% from 428,650 in the pandemic hit 2020.
For income protection, 196,722 new policies were sold in 2021, again up almost 9% from 181,126 in 2020.
Regarding health cover, the FCA said: “We can confirm that we do not hold any policy data for private medical insurance (PMI), either individual or international.”
The FCA also directed Health & Protection to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), however the ABI declined to share its figures for the number of in-force policies.
