We are on the cusp of a new government and five years of further political tinkering with our long-term savings – yours, mine and your clients’.
I am already feeling depressed at the thought, as I am sure you and your clients are. Leave our money alone and start backing thrift. That is my political message.
Leave our money alone and start backing thrift. That is my political message.Just over a week ago, fed up to the back teeth with politicians and their promises to tinker, I gave myself a pre-election breather by spending an evening with the first beneficiaries of the Seven Families Campaign – Tim and Tracey Clarke plus guide dog Oakley.
What a wonderful evening it turned out to be. Therapeutic for the soul. I came back from Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire – where I met them on their narrow boat – a renewed person and with my faith in humankind restored.
Although they might not welcome it I intend to visit the cheery life-affirming Clarkes every time politicians, armed with their personal gold-plated pensions, start chipping away at my karma.
As most of you know, Seven Families was launched late last year by Peter Le Beau MBE of the Income Protection Task Force. Backed by charity Disability Rights UK and a family of 20 insurance companies – providers of income protection policies – the campaign has two overriding objectives.
The first key goal is to show that with a little care, the right advice and professional help, people with challenging long-term health issues can be nudged into a better space, enabling some of them to go back to some form of work.
This is why Disability Rights UK is involved. Its laudable agenda is all about pushing for a more supportive social security system – and better support all-round – to help those derailed by a serious disability.
Its second objective – the main goal of the task force – is to demonstrate the value of income protection insurance – an insurance under-sold and under-bought. This is being done by arming seven families for a year with income protection insurance benefit, and then highlighting what a difference it has made to their lives, thereby encouraging others to go out and buy the insurance – through advisers, naturally. Family number six has just been unveiled.
As far as the Clarkes are concerned, the Seven Families Campaign has already transformed their lives.
Although there is little Tracey can do to arrest the impending loss of her sight – she suffers from optic nerve atrophy – the £600 of monthly income benefit that she and Tim receive from the campaign has made a big difference.
They have managed to buy wellington boots – something they could not afford before – and Tracey has bought software that enables her computer to read out documents when she is having a bad eye day, and they are planning to purchase more solar panels for their boat that will ease fuel costs.
Furthermore, buoyed by advice from the likes of RedArc and Action for Blind People, she has now found the confidence to consider taking up writing as a career. She has had a series of articles published in various publications and she is now looking to turn a regular blog about four-year-old Oakley, an adorable black Labrador, into a book.
Understandably, the Clarkes cannot talk highly enough about Seven Families – and I found it incredibly emotional listening to them. They are thoroughly decent people supported by their Christian faith. But without wishing to offend Peter Le Beau, I am not sure the campaign is as effective as it could be. It is all too low-key.
By way of example, Aegon (a backer of the campaign) put out a decent press release a few days ago calling for the protection insurance industry to better promote claims statistics, demonstrating that policies tend to pay more claims than reject them.
It then went on to state that it was “proud” to be a partner of the Seven Families initiative, even pointing readers of the release – horrible people like me, members of the Fifth Estate – to a YouTube video of Graeme Snell, one of the chosen seven.
So far so good. Yet for the life of me, I could not find a dickybird about the campaign on Aegon’s website where all the current emphasis seems to be on encouraging people to be financially prepared for retirement. Indeed, it was not particularly easy to find information on protection insurance – let alone search for elusive mentions of Seven Families.
Surely, it would not take much of a computer geek’s time to put a little detail about Seven Families on Aegon’s consumer-facing website – with maybe a link to the same YouTube video it promoted in its press release.
Similarly, there is no mention of the campaign on Aviva’s consumer website page relating to income protection insurance.
Just as surprisingly, Disability Rights UK is hardly blowing the campaign’s trumpet. A search on its website reveals details of the campaign’s launch in November last year – and there is also more recent coverage of a blog Tracey Clarke wrote for the publishers of disability lifestyle magazine Enable. But that is about it. Seven Families does not even make it into the charity’s section on the campaigns it is involved in.
Even the Income Protection Task Force’s own website seems to have given up the ghost. Second item in its ‘recent posts’ section is about the launch of Seven Families more than five months ago. Oh dear.
Everyone involved in the Seven Families campaign needs to raise their game and start banging the protection insurance drum. Otherwise, it could turn out to be an almighty damp squib and protection insurance sales will continue to sink as fast as my trust in politicians.
Jeff Prestridge is personal finance editor of the Mail on Sunday
