The past year saw a “rebalancing” of the market, with individual protection policies sales declining across most product groups.
This is according to Jennifer Gilchrist, protection industry affairs manager at Swiss Re, on a media call following release of the reinsurer’s Term & Health Watch which showed a 1.7% decline in new protection policies sold in the UK – falling to 2,003,907 in 2025.
This trend was reflected across product segments – term with and without critical illness sales were down 2.88% to 1,381,577 policies sold, guaranteed whole of life policies sales down 12.5% to 192,051 and underwritten whole of life with critical illness sales down 23.4% to 3,254.
However, standalone critical illness sales were up 2.1% to 137,263, along with underwritten whole of life sales, up 0.7% to 26,768 and income protection sales up 11.9% to 266,994.
Rebalancing of the market
Gilchrist maintained that there has been a “rebalancing” of the market.
“While the numbers have gone down marginally I would say, we can see that there are strengths in the market – income protection, standalone critical illness,” she said.
“What we’re seeing is customers have a think about what is the right product for them within the budget that they are trying to work with.
“And while before the go-to product was life and CI, now we’re seeing that income protection being the starting position and then other products being added on.
“Or actually is it that they will do so much now and come back to that?”
Changing conversations
But Gilchrist noted a further trend underlying the figures – that of changing conversations between advisers and their customers.
“The other things that did come through as well is advisers talking about the protection conversations changing and a number of them talking about doing regular reviews rather than it being no, you do it at the time you buy a house and you don’t do it again.
“We were seeing them talk about the regular review rather than leaving it for a number of years until they’ve either moved house or taken out a new mortgage contract.”
