Alan Lakey, a partner at Highclere Financial Services, claims that Critical Illness providers need to look after their customers fairly, and not be bound by the wordings on the contract, according to new review site Quote Critical Illness.

He said, “During the mid 1990s, I began analysing the competing plans and the contractual wordings to ensure that my recommendations were based around maximising the likelihood of a successful claim rather than on price.

“Back then, Scottish Provident and Skandia offered the premier plans in respect of quality. Indeed, at point, I had to explain to the regulator why over 25 per cent of my business had gone the way of Scottish Provident.

“In Sept 2006, Abbey tired of its toy and sold Scottish Provident to Phoenix Life, then part of the Resolution Group.  During 2008, the Scottish Provident brand was sold to Royal London, with older plans remaining with Phoenix which rebranded them under its name in January 2009.

“The point of this exposition is that those clients who were provided with high quality Scottish Provident policies throughout the late 1990s and early noughties have found themselves consigned to a company that focuses on administering existing plans and is not in the new business market.  This has concerned me for some time as it removed one of the prime reasons to be accommodating when considering a claim.  This concern solidified when, after 21 years, I encountered my first rejected claim.

“Let me be clear, Phoenix Life, in rejecting my client’s claim, has not acted illegally or failed to heed the precise wording of the cancer definition concerned.  However, as an industry, we strive to pay claims where possible and need to look beyond the precision that contractual wordings provide.    Other providers currently active in the market have intimated that they would have paid this claim, even though technically it could be declined.  Their attitude is shaped by customer consideration and the knowledge that each declined claim eats away at the industry’s assertion that it treats the customer fairly.”