Letting agents could be the key to filling the income protection gap, according to panellists featuring in the opening day of Income Protection Action Week (IPAW) 2026.
Mike Farrell, sales and marketing director at LV=, maintained that the insurer had not managed to ensure take up of income protection products for renters.
“We had a couple of goes at trying to sort out the problem of covering rental clients and it’s quite tricky,” Farrell said.
Farrell noted the first attempt 15 years ago “didn’t quite cut through“.
“Then we tried it again a couple of years ago by looking at taking the maximum benefit from an income protection policy and just talking about mortgages and rents and again it didn’t quite land,“ he continued.
“So I think it’s a problem that needs a solution and we haven’t quite got there yet.”
Talk to letting agents
But fellow panellist Marta Scott-Manuszewska, director of Five Star Mortgages, suggested a solution could lie in how advisers engage with experts from parallel sectors.
“We need to speak to the customers a little bit earlier about income protection,“ Scott-Manuszewska said.
“It’s difficult to find them because people don’t wake up first thing in the morning and say, ‘hey, I’m 22 years old I want income protection’, so maybe try to speak to those customers.
“Speak to your friendly letting agent. Speak to the parents. See if they’d be interested in getting their kids in front of you, but definitely we have to change the narrative – 40s is too late for income protection in my opinion.”
Farrell added he liked that idea.
“You’re saying if you’ve got a tenant who has got an income protection policy and one who hasn’t, other things being equal, surely the tenant with the income protection policy must be more of an attractive risk to a landlord, so maybe that’s the way we approach it,” he said.
“It’s by engaging with estate agents and trying to educate them and letting agents as well.”