What insurance do people need to protect their possessions, feel secure and build their resilience?

Last month, our Head of Strategy Jake Attfield facilitated a series of roundtable discussions focused on developing contents insurance and protection solutions for individuals in vulnerable circumstances with specific housing needs.

We brought together leaders from the insurance and housing sectors with civil society organisations, to explore the key barriers to access, the potential need for a minimum level of home protection, and innovative approaches and solutions to better serve the individual needs of consumers in vulnerable circumstances.

There were a wider range of ideas discussed across five separate roundtables and some common themes and solutions emerged which, when taken together, could have a profound impact on the take up of contents insurance products among groups of people who currently lack any protection against the unexpected.

The five key takeaways were:

• Government to support regulatory and other structural changes to increase the take up of protection products
• Insurers to review customer journeys and set new standards for product documentation and to take more responsibility for ensuring that consumers can and do understand their products 
• Establish a stakeholder coalition to define a minimum value contents insurance product to better meet the needs of low-income consumers and people with specific housing needs 
• The insurance sector to champion product innovation to reframe contents insurance as possessions protection and improve the value and consumer choice
• To test the feasibility of housing associations offering a contents insurance product to their tenants on an opt-out basis

A more detailed read out of the session can be found here along with the pre-reading and background information that was shared with participants prior to the workshop. 

Fair4All Finance intend to take the final recommendation forward in 2025. Our aim will be to see if the opt-out model will work for insurers, housing associations and consumers and what regulatory and / or legislative levers would be required to scale it. Later this year we intend to start a formal process to bring together the right partners to develop and implement what will be our first insurance focussed proposition pilot.

A key foundation step to this process will be to define the minimum level of protection that still meets the needs of social housing tenants and we are looking forward to continuing to work with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and others on this.

We will also be feeding all the other recommendations into the Access to Insurance Sub-Committee that is developing proposals for the Government’s new Financial Inclusion Strategy, which is also due to be published later this year.

Once again, a huge thank you to our partners at Institute and Faculty of Actuaries for hosting us at Staple Inn, and to everyone who contributed their expertise, energy, and insights to the session. If you or your organisation are interested in being involved in this programme of work or have ideas about how to make it even more successful then please do not hesitate to get in touch with Jake at Jake@fair4allfinance.org.uk.