I work in insurance myself and I am very concerned about companies and individuals mis-selling policies and other aspects of not treating customers fairly. Therefore I think a code of conduct should be applied to both the insurance companies themselves and the individual staff within them.
In the past week or so, 2 insurance companies have been fined by the FSA for not following consumer protection rules. Firstly, Hastings Direct was fined £735,000 for cancelling around 4,550 incorrectly priced car insurance policies without giving the customers the opportunity to pay the premium shortfall:
Insurance Times - FSA fines Hastings £735,000
Also, I read in The Independent today that Liverpool Victoria has been fined £840,000 for mis-selling payment protection insurance:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ppi-misselling-fine-for-liverpool-victoria-881411.html
Judging by the latter article, it doesn't sound like LV are genuinely sorry for what they have done. If the FSA hadn't fined them, they would have probably carried on the same way and I bet they wouldn't have paid compensation to the customers they misled either.
I'm not laughing at these 2 companies just because they are rivals, indeed if one of my own colleagues or my own employer behaved in this way, I would expect them to be dealt with appropriately too.
I think it's time there was an industry-wide code of conduct that everyone working in insurance has to follow, and this should apply to the individuals aswell as the companies. If an individual breaks the code, then they should be banned from working in insurance (particularly in a customer-facing role) for a period of years. In particularly serious cases, they should be banned indefinitely.
The CII has a code of ethics that all its members must follow, but it's not effective enough because not all insurance employees are CII members; for most staff it's not even a requirement that they become a member. So that's why I think there should be a compulsory code of conduct covering all insurance companies and their staff.
The Hastings and LV cases both sound like institutional-level failure, but there have also been cases where individual staff have abused their position of trust - for example, I remember seeing a TV programme where Carphone Warehouse staff were caught mis-selling mobile phone insurance policies so they could get a higher bonus (I think it was on Watchdog or one of the similar consumer programmes about a year ago).
And then there was that Whistleblower programme about Barclays Bank, in which a member of staff tried to sell a home insurance policy to a man who was so poor that he didn't even have a bed to sleep in!
The insurance industry has a poor reputation amongst many consumers, and I think it is important that something is done about it. People shouldn't have to worry that they are being sold a policy that they don't need. If there was some kind of code of conduct, consumers could be protected from these abuses.
What does everyone else here think about this subject?
Should there be a compulsory code of conduct for everyone working in insurance? 
