Why income protection keeps getting skipped – and how to fix it

Mortgage brokers are calling for greater adviser education and a fundamental shift in how income protection (IP) is positioned to clients, after data from Royal London revealed only 7% of UK adults hold the cover – compared with 32% for life insurance.

The figures, which emerged from Royal London's 2025 claims data, have prompted fresh scrutiny of whether the broker community is doing enough to close a gap that Consumer Duty obligations are making increasingly difficult to ignore.

'It's a sales problem'

Joe Stallard (pictured top left), managing director at House and Holiday Home Mortgages, told Mortgage Introducer the issue is less about product quality and more about how advisers approach the conversation.

"It really comes down to a sales problem and helping advisors position it better to clients to get them to really understand the importance of it," he said. "If you don't have your income, you can't pay your premiums on any of the other products you're taking out. It is the fundamental piece of the jigsaw for most people."

Stallard argued mandatory income protection is not a realistic solution, citing the complexities of medical underwriting. "I would love it if there were a way it could work, but somebody much smarter than myself would need to design a way of that working," he said. "It has to come down to education. We as brokers have to understand the importance of it and we have to be able to illustrate that to clients as well."

Chetan Jethwa (pictured top middle), managing director at Vistaara Financial Solutions, told Mortgage Introducer about where the problem starts. "In my opinion, it's a lot of misinformation around what income protection actually is, because there's a lot of brokers out there and advisers who don't fully understand what income protection is," he said.

Jethwa described IP as essentially a cash machine. "If you can't work due to any long-term illness, sickness or accident, it will continue paying you for whatever period, whether it's a one-year product, two-year product, five-year product, or all the way up until the age of 70," he said. "When you explain that to a client and then you do a like-for-like comparison between income protection and what a life insurance critical illness policy pays out, you might find that over your working lifetime that income protection has paid you more."

'It's non-negotiable'

For some advisers, the protection conversation is baked into every client interaction, regardless of circumstance. Jethwa said for all regulated mortgage clients, whether a first-time buyer or a home mover, presenting income protection is not optional.

"For me it's non-negotiable," he said. "I will always provide indicative quotes of income protection. I still present clients with all of the options and make sure they fully understand them."

He added the stakes are particularly high for clients who believe their employer or the NHS will cover them in the event of serious illness. "I work with a lot of healthcare professionals – a lot of doctors, dentists, nurses and surgeons – and you'd actually be surprised that they don't fully have cover," he said. "And then you have the conversation with them and say, look, if you're an intensive care consultant, why haven't you got cover? 'Oh, the NHS will look after me'. After 12 months, they’re not going to look after you, so what happens then?"

Mike Powell (pictured top right), managing director at Mike Powell Mortgages, told Mortgage Introducer the product's complexity can work against it, particularly at the point of mortgage completion when clients are focused on securing their deal. "It can be lost," he acknowledged. "But it's always client specific. With Consumer Duty, one of the better parts of it is helping us to identify and evidence customers that need income protection and to try and explain it to them a little bit easier."

Powell noted the mindset barrier is often the hardest to break. "A lot of clients still believe it's not going to happen to them. The usual one is, 'I haven't been off sick for three, four, five years, so why do I need this?' It's more about trying to educate clients and to position income protection as a core part of financial planning."

The remortgage window

With an estimated 1.8 million borrowers coming off fixed-rate deals in 2026, brokers see this year's remortgage wave as a clear opportunity to revisit protection conversations that may have been deferred or declined at the point of original purchase.

Stallard described the remortgage as a natural gateway into wider financial planning. "Maybe it's an opportunity to review something that somebody hasn't taken in the past because they were at a different stage of their life," he said. "What we need to make sure we're doing as advisers is actually having that conversation and not just going through the remortgage and making the assumption that everything is okay. Just because something didn't hit a chord with them five years ago doesn't mean now is not the right time."

Powell echoed this, noting that product transfers are equally valid triggers. "Even on product transfers, it's part of the job," he said. "Income protection can be relatively cheap as well, especially if you can push the deferred period out. People are used to insuring their cars, pets, travel. But then trying to ask them to insure their lifestyle or keep themselves in the house, for some reason it's still sometimes a harder bit of advice to give."

For advisers who embed a consistent IP conversation at both purchase and remortgage, the Consumer Duty argument is becoming harder to sidestep. Where a client's mortgage depends on a single income with limited employer sick pay, failing to address IP on the file is difficult to defend. As Jethwa put it: "It replaces your income to pay for your life cover, your critical illness, your buildings insurance. Without that foundation, it's all going to come plunging down."

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