Royal London has plans for the over-fifties...

Outlook

Into my inbox drops a press release from Royal London, the mutual life insurer, criticising life insurance products sold to the over-fifties.

Such policies don’t receive a great deal of publicity, but RL would like to change that: it’s come up with some big numbers, such as claiming that £173m of life insurance was lost in 2014 because 52,000 people cancelled their policies, shoving £86m of wasted cash into the pockets of life insurers as a result. In between calling for the industry’s bigwigs to get together for a pow-wow, it has a cure for the market’s ills, which is to follow the example of, erm, Royal London. Well there’s a surprise.

Still, it does raise a few valid points, such as suggesting that policies be made more flexible to allow those who fall into financial difficulty to keep them up. The issue is worth looking at, not least because the demographic that buys them is growing at quite a clip. But it’s not the industry that should heed RL – this is one for the Financial Conduct Authority.