There has been a dramatic 29% fall in complaints about protection insurance products, according to data from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Analysis of the complaints data shows there were 61,834 complaints about protection insurance products in 2020, more than 25,000 fewer than the 87,619 complaints in 2019.
However, the data does show a marginal increase in complaints about health insurance products which were up to 117,706 from 112,123 in 2019.
This continues a rising trend which saw health and medical insurance-related complaints rise from 91,400 in 2017 to 107,000 in 2018.
Medical and health insurance complaints rose by 6% of the course of 2020 from 57,037 in H1 to 60,670 in H2. And this figure was up on the 55,290 in the second half of 2019.
Encouragingly, new protection-related complaints lodged with the regulator dipped in the second half of the year.
There were 23,674 complaints submitted regarding whole of life, term assurance and critical illness – down from 25,825 in the first half of the year and from 34,543 in the second half of 2019.
It was a similar story with income protection and other accident, sickness and unemployment complaints dipping to 4,062 in the last six months of 2020, down from 5,352 in the preceding six months and from 7,161 in the same period of 2019.
And other pure protection complaints dropped to 1,333 from 1,588 earlier in 2020 and 2070 in the latter half of 2019.
Big picture
However, overall the protection and health insurance sectors remain among the least complained about within the financial services industry.
Looking at the latest data for the whole industry for the second half of 2020 published yesterday, firms received 2.19m complaints, 26% lower than in H1 2020 when 2.96m complaints were recorded – representing the lowest levels recorded since H2 2016.
The most complained about products in H2 2020 were current accounts which made up 23% of all complaints, payment protection insurance (PPI) which accounted for 12%, credit cards (11%), other general insurance products (11%) and motor and transport insurance (9%).