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Major Insurers Could be Losing out on Gay Insurance

The Equality Act of 2007 sought to end discrimination against gays applying for insurance in Britain. When insuring couples, companies are required to evaluate gay marriages (officially known as civil partnerships) in exactly the same way as they would heterosexual ones. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) confirmed their adherence to this in July.

NoClaimsDiscount.co.uk (http://www.noclaimsdiscount.co.uk) has found that in practice, though, gay couples may have to wait a while before applying for insurance becomes completely problem-free. One of the major reasons is the insurance bureaucracy itself: in plainest terms, the insurance industry in its application process generally assumes that people are heterosexual - i.e. that the two people attached to the policy equals one male and one female, along with all the data that the two genders generate for risk assessment.

While an insurer may be formally in compliance with the Equality Act, its offline and online procedures may not have been adapted to allow effective same-sex applications. Helen Ward, of gay advocacy group Stonewall, has said that an online application form may not provide a facility for correctly indicating marital status. So a computer may not recognise the second partner in the application because he or she is of the same sex as the first. Also, same-sex couples may not have the opportunity to mention that they are in a civil partnership if the term is not offered as an option on the form.

Plus, customer service personnel may not be trained to deal with questions, claims, complaints and feedback from gay couples. NoClaimsDiscount.co.uk asked a few customer service teams whether a gay civil partner was to be named as spouse or partner. Norwich Union stated spouse, as did Churchill'ss car insurance (http://www.noclaimsdiscount.co.uk/car/) department - but Churchill'ss home insurance (http://www.noclaimsdiscount.co.uk/home/) department stated partner. When asked about this discrepancy, spokesperson Claire Foster said that at Churchill, a 'spartner's was a person you were living with as if you were married, and so was treated as a spouse. She went on to add that Churchill recognised civil partnerships in accordance with the law and that premiums did not change whether you were a partner or a spouse.

Is it that time-consuming to redesign application forms to accurately account for gay couples and re-train staff Even conservative insurers have shown great speed in re-branding or initiating new products and services when the need arises. It is therefore difficult to understand why the process of reconfiguring application forms to accommodate gay applicants should take more than a year. Besides, as Helen Ward suggests, all that really needs to be done on the application form is to include the following terms under Marital Status:

Married/Civil Partnered, and these terms under Partner'ss Details: Husband/Wife/Civil Partner.

As long as gay couples continue to have these problems, firms that specialise in gay insurance will capitalise on them. The longer it takes for major insurance companies to address this situation, the more gay policyholders they may lose to these specialist insurers (http://www.noclaimsdiscount.co.uk/insurance/).

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