The Association of British Insurers has published two guides designed to help insurance and pension firms identify and respond to economic and domestic abuse, developed with charities Surviving Economic Abuse and the Employers' Initiative on Domestic Abuse.
Economic abuse involves controlling a partner or former partner's access to money, assets and financial resources. Through insurance products specifically, it works in a small number of documented ways: redirecting claims payments to a perpetrator's account, forcing withdrawals from pension or protection products, or cancelling or amending home, motor, health or mortgage-related cover without the other person's knowledge. That last pattern leaves the victim exposed at the point they most need cover - when the relationship has broken down and they are trying to access a policy that no longer exists, or whose terms have been changed without their consent. According to Surviving Economic Abuse, one in six women in the UK has experienced economic abuse from a current or former partner.
The guides were launched in Parliament with backing from HM Treasury as part of the government's Financial Inclusion Strategy.
The customer-facing guide, developed with Surviving Economic Abuse, sets out how firms should identify risk, enable safe disclosure, and redesign customer journeys and communications with economic abuse in mind. The most specific recommendation concerns joint critical illness and medical cover: providers should ensure a customer is not agreeing to cover that increases their financial dependence on another person, and should send correspondence about appointments, authorisations and treatment pathways separately to each person named on a joint policy rather than to a single household contact.
That last point is a design change rather than a policy statement. Many insurers currently route all joint policy correspondence to a single address or contact. The guidance argues this design assumption hands one partner control over what the other knows about their own cover - and that changing it is a concrete step firms can take without waiting for regulatory compulsion.
The second guide, developed with the Employers' Initiative on Domestic Abuse, addresses how firms can build workplace environments where colleagues experiencing abuse can safely disclose and access support. Home Office data from 2019 estimated domestic abuse costs businesses in England £17 billion annually. Office for National Statistics figures show 12.5 million adults have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16.
Lucy Rigby, economic secretary to the Treasury, noted that abusers can use insurance specifically to maintain control - trapping victims in policies they want to leave or cancelling policies they depend on. Sam Smethers, chief executive of Surviving Economic Abuse, said the industry is beginning to change but urged firms to go beyond regulatory requirements by strengthening staff training and designing products that close down opportunities for abuse rather than leaving control with the abuser.
What distinguishes this guidance from a general statement of intent is its specificity about how insurance products can be turned into tools of control. The mechanisms it identifies - redirected claim payments, forced withdrawals, unilateral policy cancellations, and household correspondence that assumes a single point of contact - are operational design questions, not aspirational ones.
The practical test will be whether product and claims processes actually change as a result. Separate correspondence on joint policies, safe disclosure routes built into claims journeys, staff trained to recognise warning signs before a case escalates - these are implementable changes. Whether the guidance prompts firms to make them, or becomes a reference document retrieved only after harm has already occurred, is the measure of whether publishing it was enough.
