When Your Insurance Can't Hear You
What if the very system designed to protect you has been quietly built to exclude you?
Insurance sells you certainty. Pay your premiums, follow the rules, and when disaster strikes, you’ll be covered. That’s the contract. That’s the promise. That’s the story every insurer tells.
But here’s the truth no one in the boardroom wants to face: protection only works if the system can hear you. And for 18 million people in the UK, one in three adults, that promise collapses the moment they pick up the phone.
Picture this.
A crash at 3 AM on the M25. You survive. You reach for your phone to call the “24/7 emergency line” that promised it would always be there. But if you’re Deaf, that line may as well be a brick wall. No text. No video relay. No real-time option. Just silence where protection should be.
By morning, the evidence is gone. The witnesses have left. The road has been washed clean by rain. When you finally find a way to report it, your claim is flagged as “suspicious late notification.” Liability is disputed. Protection becomes denial.
And yet the premiums? They were taken without hesitation. For seven years. Month after month. No questions asked. Until the one time you needed to claim.
This isn’t an anecdote. This isn’t a glitch. It’s a blind spot the size of an entire market £274 billion of disabled household spending power, treated as if it doesn’t exist.
The unsettling truth is this: you don’t need to be Deaf to see the flaw. The entire insurance model is built on the assumption that your customers can hear you. Which means this isn’t just about accessibility.
It’s about the integrity of protection itself.
Here’s what should keep every insurance CEO awake at night: 18 million UK adults live with some form of hearing loss.
That’s not a sliver of your customer base. That’s not a “special group.” That’s one in three adults in this country.
Not niche. Not marginal. Not optional. One. In. Three.
And it gets even sharper when you see who we’re really talking about:
Over half of everyone aged 55 and above.
Around 80% of people over 70.
These aren’t fringe demographics. These are your core customers. The people who hold life insurance, health cover, pensions, home insurance, travel insurance. The policyholders who have been paying premiums for decades, the customers you count on for retention and loyalty.
And within that 18 million are tens of thousands of people for whom British Sign Language (BSL) is their first language. For these customers, voice-only systems are not just inconvenient. They are unusable. Every call centre, every helpline, every “please call us” letter becomes a wall that locks them out of protection they’ve paid for.
Now let’s talk about what should terrify your CFO: the Purple Pound. Disabled households in the UK command £274 billion in annual spending power and that was in 2020.
In today’s money, it’s significantly higher.
Every inaccessible claims line. Every voice-only helpline. Every digital portal that fails basic accessibility. Each one is not just a service failure; it is revenue bleeding out of your business. Walking straight into your competitors’ arms or disappearing from the market entirely.
And globally? The numbers are staggering:
1.5 billion people worldwide live with hearing loss today.
By 2050, that number will rise to 2.5 billion, one in four humans on Earth.
This is not hypothetical. It is not “future risk.” It is statistical certainty.
The future of your customer base will be older, more diverse, and include millions more people who cannot navigate voice-only systems.
If your insurance products cannot hear them, then they will fail them. And when they fail your customers, they will also fail your risk models, your retention rates, and your brand reputation.
This is not about “accessibility.” This is about whether your industry is preparing for the market it already has and the one that is arriving faster than you think.
Now let’s talk about Mrs E.
She’s a Deaf patient in York who needed routine medical care from her GP. For three years, yes, three whole years, she was denied access to British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters because of a funding dispute. The GP practice insisted she “manage with written notes,” despite the fact that BSL was her first language.
Three years of sitting across from doctors without being able to fully understand them. Three years of not being able to explain her own symptoms. Three years of unsafe, unequal care.
When the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman finally stepped in, the findings were unambiguous: a clear breach of the Equality Act 2010.
Mrs E received £3,000 in compensation, a formal apology, and NHS England was forced to implement a mandatory action plan.
And here’s the part the insurance industry cannot ignore: this wasn’t an anomaly.
A 2025 RNID report revealed that 67% of BSL users have been denied the communication support they needed in healthcare. Disability advocates called it what it is: a national scandal.
Now stop and do the substitution test:
Replace GP practice with insurance company.
Replace medical appointment with claims call.
The obligations are the same. The Equality Act 2010 doesn’t care whether you’re a doctor or an insurer. The duty is clear: you must make reasonable adjustments, proactively, to ensure disabled people are not disadvantaged.
And yet, just like Mrs E’s GP practice, insurers are making the same errors every single day. Voice-only helplines. Phone-based ID checks. Digital portals that fail accessibility standards.
The only difference?
In healthcare, regulators have already called it a scandal. In insurance, you’re still pretending it’s “business as usual.”
If you think Deaf access is a side issue, think again.
The UK insurance market is already failing; loudly, publicly, and measurably. Adding Deaf exclusion to that mess doesn’t just make it worse. It exposes just how fragile your promise of protection really is.
In September 2025, Which? filed a super-complaint with the FCA. Their findings? A sector riddled with systemic failures in home and travel insurance: poor claims handling, inappropriate sales practices, rejection rates so high they tear the credibility out of the word insurance.
The numbers are brutal:
Only 32% of storm damage claims resulted in a payout.
Acceptance rates swing wildly: 63% for buildings insurance, 72% for combined home, 80% for travel compared to 99% for motor insurance.
Buildings insurance complaints are at a ten-year high, with poor communication cited as a primary cause.
This isn’t bad luck. This is market dysfunction. And into that dysfunction, the industry has hard-wired something even more damaging: systems that Deaf people literally cannot use.
Think about it. A process already plagued by low payouts and poor handling is the same process that demands a phone call from someone who cannot hear. A market already drowning in complaints is the same market that locks Deaf customers out of redress by insisting they complain… over the phone.
This isn’t just exclusion. It’s systemic harm multiplied:
Valid claims flagged as “late” or “suspicious” because a Deaf customer couldn’t report instantly.
Homeowners penalised for “failure to mitigate damage” when the real failure was the insurer’s inaccessible helpline.
Families stranded abroad with “24/7 emergency support” that, in practice, only existed for hearing people.
And the FCA knows it.
In July 2025, it uncovered “concerning evidence” of poor claims practices in motor and home insurance. Its estimate: 270,000 motorists may be owed £200 million in compensation for underpaid claims.
In the same breath, it urged insurers to improve accessibility and dismantle barriers.
Let’s be crystal clear: this is no longer about “best practice.” It’s not about looking progressive. It’s not about ticking a CSR box.
The FCA has already moved Deaf accessibility; not generic accessibility, but communication access into the category of regulatory priority.
Translation for boards: if you don’t fix this, you won’t just lose customers. You’ll face Ombudsman payouts, regulator enforcement, and Equality Act litigation all while bleeding trust from one in three adults you claim to serve.
Let’s be clear: the law already covers Deaf customers, and insurers are breaking it every day.
The Equality Act 2010
Under Section 29(7), you have a legal duty to make “reasonable adjustments” so that Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are not placed at a substantial disadvantage when accessing your services. This duty is proactive and anticipatory. That means you can’t wait for a Deaf customer to complain. You must design your services from the start so they can be used by people who cannot hear.
Ask yourself: if a Deaf driver cannot report a crash because your claims line is voice-only, have you already placed them at a substantial disadvantage?
The answer is obvious. Yes.
And “reasonable”? The bar has already been set.
Since June 2022, the UK’s 999 emergency services have nationwide BSL video relay. If emergency infrastructure can handle life-or-death calls in sign language, then an insurer has no excuse. “Too complex” won’t stand up in court, to regulators, or to the public.
The FCA’s Consumer Duty
The Consumer Duty, in force since July 2023, doesn’t just encourage better practice. It demands evidence. You must prove your communication channels produce fair outcomes for all customers including Deaf ones.
If your claims line only works for hearing people, you cannot prove that. If your onboarding process requires a phone call, you cannot prove that. If your complaints system assumes the customer can speak, you cannot prove that.
The Financial Ombudsman Service
And when those failures land at the Financial Ombudsman Service, the result is predictable. Claims denied because a Deaf customer couldn’t access your line. Complaints escalated because updates were only given over the phone. Compensation awarded for distress and inconvenience.
Unlike a one-off FCA fine, these cases drip-feed into your operations day after day, slowly bleeding your reputation and your balance sheet. Every inaccessible claims call is not just a breach waiting to be exposed. It is a breach already happening.
Here’s the reality your actuarial tables will never admit out loud: your data is lying to you.
Insurance analytics reward “observable” events; claims reported, complaints logged, outcomes recorded. But what happens when an entire customer group can’t get into the system in the first place? The loss still occurs. The crash still happens. The house still floods.
But if a Deaf customer can’t report it on your voice-only helpline, the event vanishes from your dataset.
And your models congratulate themselves for looking clean.
Not because risk is lower, but because you’ve designed a system that filters out people you couldn’t hear.
This is not an ethical footnote. This is corruption at the core of your risk models. It distorts:
Pricing you underprice risk in demographics where valid claims never make it through.
Reserving you under-reserve because the true exposure is invisible in your books.
Retention metrics you misread loyalty when, in reality, excluded customers have simply stopped trying.
Complaints data you think complaints are low, when in truth, complaining requires a phone call.
A concrete example: Deaf customers routinely face higher denial rates not because their claims are weaker, but because communication barriers cause “late notification,” “insufficient evidence,” or “incomplete information.”
To your actuaries, that looks like “lower risk” in that segment. In reality, you’ve built an algorithm that rewards exclusion.
That means two things at once:
You are under-reserved against the true risk exposure, because your models suppress the losses that actually happen.
You are missing revenue from a massive market you’ve priced out of existence, by assuming “low risk” is real rather than the product of silence.
So let’s call it what it is: you are not modeling risk. You are modeling who has the privilege of being heard.
And when regulators, litigators, and the Ombudsman finally connect the dots, it won’t just be a compliance issue. It will be a scandal because the exclusion wasn’t an accident. It was a design choice.
Where Systems Break Down
Let’s map a typical insurance journey and ask one brutal question at each stage: could a Deaf customer get through?
Marketing & Discovery
Videos without captions.
Product tools that demand audio.
Terms and conditions buried in unsearchable image PDFs.
The WebAIM Million 2025 report found that 94.8% of homepages contain detectable accessibility failures. Chances are your marketing site sits in that 95%. That means Deaf customers aren’t even starting on equal ground. They’re blocked before they’ve begun.
Quote & Identity Verification
“Confirm your identity by phone.” No alternatives. Every drop-off in that funnel shows up in your analytics as “lack of interest.” In reality, it’s “locked out by your system.”
Sale & Documentation
Contracts written in dense legalese, no plain-English translation, no BSL summaries, documents that can’t be read by a screen-reader. When a claim is later denied under an exclusion the Deaf customer never understood, ask yourself: was that an informed contract, or was it a trap dressed as a sale?
Mid-Term Adjustments
“Call us to make changes.” No text, no video. So material changes go undeclared — not because customers are negligent, but because your process made declaration inaccessible. Later, you deny the claim and call it “fraud.” In truth, the fraud belongs to the system.
First Notice of Loss - The Critical Failure Point
This is where exclusion becomes catastrophic. Voice-only helplines, no real-time text, no BSL video relay, no asynchronous messaging. The result?
Late notification.
Denied liability.
“Non-cooperation” flags that are actually communication failures.
And here’s the killer comparison: as explained earlier since 2022, UK emergency services have provided 999 BSL video relay nationwide.
If a Deaf person can report a life-threatening emergency in BSL, they should damn well be able to report a burst pipe or a car crash. Anything less is indefensible.
Claims Assessment
Appointments booked by phone, evidence requests explained only verbally, documentation pathways that lock Deaf customers out. Then the claim is declined for “insufficient evidence” or “failure to cooperate.” It wasn’t lack of cooperation. It was systematic exclusion disguised as process.
Financial Impact
Disabled people in the UK already face £550 more in monthly costs and £108,000 less in lifetime savings compared to non-disabled peers.
When you wrongly deny a Deaf customer’s claim on top of that, the harm doesn’t just add up; it multiplies, compounding exclusion into financial precarity.
Complaints & Ombudsman
And when the claim fails? Complaint processes assume phone access too. So escalation becomes inevitable: the Ombudsman steps in, awards compensation, and your brand equity takes another blow.
This isn’t a handful of oversights. This is exclusion at every stage of your customer journey. From the first advert to the final complaint, your systems are tuned for hearing people and Deaf customers are left paying premiums for services they cannot use.
“But We’ve Gone Digital!”
Two dangerous myths persist in insurance boardrooms:
Myth 1: “We have a chatbot, so accessibility is solved.”
Reality: Unless your chatbot is built with real-time text integration, escalation pathways to human handlers trained in Deaf communication, and compliance with accessibility standards, you haven’t solved anything. You’ve just automated the brick wall.
Myth 2: “BSL video relay is operationally too complex.”
Reality: Since 2022, the UK’s 999 emergency services have provided nationwide BSL video relay for life-and-death situations. If emergency responders can do it for fires and heart attacks, you can do it for burst pipes and road accidents. This is not about physics. It’s about priorities.
And here’s the proof:
Aviva has already implemented BSL video-relay at scale. Partnering with Convo (formerly SignLive), Aviva now offers free interpreter access for Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers across core products including car, home, life, health, pensions, savings, equity release, and lifetime care insurance. The service is available via mobile apps and web browsers whenever Aviva’s phone lines are open.
Is it perfect? No. Aviva’s rollout began with home and motor insurance and still has coverage gaps across some journeys.
But the point is clear: mainstream accessibility is not only possible; it’s already operational. If Aviva can embed BSL access across multiple high-volume product lines, every other insurer can too.
So when your board says “too difficult,” understand what that really means: it’s not about capability. It’s about choice. A choice to hear only some customers, and to shut out millions of others.
The Data You Don’t Collect
Let’s talk about the numbers that never make it into your dashboards.
Ask your operations team and demand honest answers:
How many claims are delayed or denied because your channels can’t be accessed by Deaf customers?
What’s the average time it takes for a Deaf policyholder to reach a human who can actually help them?
How many of your policy documents exist in formats that a Deaf customer can genuinely use; plain English, captioned videos, BSL summaries?
When Deaf customers declare communication needs, how often are those needs actually met and how often do they escalate into complaints?
Do you even track interpreter usage, service-level compliance, and the cost of failures versus the cost of getting it right?
If you can’t answer these questions with hard data, you are not “data-driven.” You are systematically blind.
And here’s the legal reality: under the FCA’s Consumer Duty, it is no longer enough to say your services are “available.”
You must prove that your communications enable fair outcomes for vulnerable customers. Not just in theory. In practice. With evidence.
Every missing data point is not an absence. It’s a liability. Every uncollected metric is not a gap. It’s an exposure. Every Deaf customer shut out by your systems is not invisible. They are a future complaint, an Ombudsman ruling, or a class action waiting to happen.
You think silence is the absence of data but it is your biggest risk signal and you’re ignoring it.
What Success Looks Like
This isn’t just about avoiding harm. It’s about seizing opportunity.
Look at Aviva. By partnering with Convo (formerly SignLive), they’ve proven that mainstream accessibility is operationally possible right now:
Coverage across major insurance products, from car and home to pensions and lifetime care.
Access via mobile apps and web browsers.
Process: simple one-time registration, then instant BSL interpreter access whenever phone lines are open.
Use cases: claims, policy changes, general inquiries in other words, the entire customer relationship.
This isn’t a pilot scheme. This isn’t “limited rollout.” This is mainstream accessibility in one of the UK’s largest insurers. If they can do it, the excuse of “too difficult” collapses.
And the payoffs are clear:
Market Expansion 18 million UK adults with hearing loss represent £274 billion in household spending power. Every inaccessible competitor is effectively gifting you their market share.
Customer Loyalty When you are the insurer who actually answers when Deaf customers reach out in their language, on their terms, you don’t just gain a customer. You gain loyalty that can’t be bought with discounts or gimmicks.
Reduced Complaints Accessible communication cuts misunderstandings, accelerates claims, and prevents the kind of distress that drives Ombudsman cases. Fewer complaints, fewer fines, fewer headlines.
Better Risk Data When Deaf customers can report claims promptly and fully, your loss data stops being distorted by silence. That means cleaner pricing, stronger reserving, and models that reflect reality instead of bias.
Brand Differentiation In a crowded market where products and prices blur together, being the insurer that can actually hear its Deaf customers is not a side benefit. It’s a category-defining differentiator.
This is what success looks like. Not compliance. Not charity. Competitive advantage.
The real question isn’t whether it’s possible.
The real question is: why are you still pretending it isn’t?
The Board Paper You Need to Write This Week
If you're a CEO, CFO, Chief Risk Officer, or General Counsel, here's the executive summary that needs to land in your next board meeting:
Risk Statement
“Our current reliance on voice-only or inadequately designed digital channels creates material risk of delayed and wrongly denied claims, unfair consumer outcomes, and regulatory breaches affecting Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers. This constitutes Consumer Duty risk, Equality Act exposure, reputational harm, and financial underperformance.”
Scale of the Issue
18 million UK adults live with hearing loss (1 in 3 adults).
UK disabled households spend £274 billion annually (Purple Pound, 2020 data; now higher).
Globally: 1.5 billion today, rising to 2.5 billion by 2050.
Market failures are already visible: only 32% of storm damage claims paid, buildings insurance complaints at a 10-year high, with communication cited as a primary cause.
Current Position
We do not measure Deaf customer outcomes (timeliness, acceptance, complaint escalation).
We cannot evidence “fair outcomes” as required by Consumer Duty.
Current posture = non-compliance risk.
What Success Looks Like
Parity in claims timeliness and acceptance rates for Deaf customers.
Zero Ombudsman decisions citing accessibility failures.
Independent audit confirms accessible journeys across the lifecycle.
Reduced complaint rates linked to communication barriers.
Growth in Purple Pound segment through market share gains.
Board Question
Do we act now to lead or wait to be forced by the FCA, the Ombudsman, and public scrutiny?
A Direct Message to Stakeholders
To Insurance CEOs and Boards
You pride yourselves on risk modelling and data-driven decisions. Yet you have a blind spot the size of 18 million people. Your systems assume every customer can hear. When that assumption fails:
Protection becomes exclusion.
Premiums become a one-way transaction.
Your risk models become fiction.
The FCA is watching. The Ombudsman is compensating. Consumer groups are filing complaints. Aviva has proven accessible systems are possible.
The only question: will you lead this change, or be forced into it?
To Regulators and Policymakers
The rules already exist; Equality Act 2010, FCA Consumer Duty, vulnerable customer guidance.
What’s missing is enforcement.
Healthcare providers who denied BSL interpreters were investigated and ordered to compensate.
When insurers create the same barriers, where is the equivalent scrutiny?
What you can do:
Require mandatory accessibility reporting in Consumer Duty disclosures.
Conduct mystery shopping of claims lines and websites.
Run thematic reviews on Deaf customer outcomes.
Name firms publicly that fail accessibility standards.
You have the power to move this from “best practice” to baseline expectation.
Use it.
To Consumer Advocates and Disability Rights Groups
You’ve called healthcare failures a “national scandal.” Insurance is no different. The legal duties are the same. The communication barriers are the same. The harm is just as real.
Your toolkit:
Document cases of denied claims and inaccessible channels.
File systematic complaints with the Financial Ombudsman Service.
Request accessibility audits under the Equality Act.
Mystery shop claims lines, apps, websites and publish rankings.
Share evidence with the FCA to strengthen enforcement.
Build coalitions (Age UK, RNID, law firms, media).
Use social media: contrast “always there for you” marketing with inaccessible reality.
To Consumers and Families
If you or someone you love is Deaf or hard of hearing:
Before you buy:
Ask: “How do I file a claim if I can’t use the phone?”
Get answers in writing.
Test the claims process before you need it.
Choose insurers who already offer BSL support (e.g. Aviva).
When things go wrong:
Document barriers and delays.
Complain in writing.
Escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service (free to consumers).
Report patterns to the FCA.
Share your story with advocates, journalists, and consumer groups.
Remember: when an insurer blocks access and then denies your claim for “late notification” or “non-cooperation,” that is their breach of the Equality Act - not your failure.
The Hard Certainty
Insurance markets claim to model risk. Much of the industry models who can get through to them.
If a customer can't hear you, and you have no robust alternative, you are not selling protection; you are selling conditionality with a premium.
That is not a customer service problem. It is not a technology problem. It is not even a compliance problem, though it's certainly that too.
It is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of what insurance claims to be.
You cannot call yourself a protection industry while building exclusion into every customer touchpoint.
You cannot claim to price risk accurately while systematically filtering out valid claims through inaccessible processes.
You cannot say you deliver fair outcomes while making "fair" dependent on a customer's ability to hear.
The Choice Is Yours
To the insurance CEOs reading this: You have a choice. Either be the company that finally proved accessibility is not charity but strategy or be the next headline in an FCA enforcement notice, the next Which? exposé, the next Ombudsman ruling.
Your name will be remembered, but not how you hoped.
To the regulators: You already have the laws, the frameworks, the evidence. Every delay is a decision to let harm continue. The question is not can you act, but how long you’re willing to let millions of people be excluded before you do.
To the consumer advocates: You exposed the healthcare scandal. Now turn the light on insurance. The same barriers exist. The same laws apply. The same harm is happening in silence.
To the customers: Your premiums are money. Your complaints are data. Your choices are power. Use them.
And to everyone else: Eighteen million people in the UK are waiting to see whether this industry will finally hear them or whether they’ll have to drag it, kicking and screaming, through the courts, regulators, and the press.
The technology exists. The market is huge. The legal duties are unambiguous. The moral case is overwhelming.
All that’s missing is the courage to stop pretending silence is acceptable.
