Enabling 40 million extra people to understand their insurance policy

England has the lowest levels of literacy in the developed world (OECD 2016). And with literacy skills in the UK predicted to decrease over time, an increasing number of the adult population will struggle to read and understand insurance policy documents.  

Browne Jacobson, a national law firm with over 500 lawyers, felt that the quality and wording of policy drafts in the market could be significantly improved. Clearer policy wording is easier to enforce, easier to sell and less likely to lead to regulatory difficulties.  

Browne Jacobson worked with the University to find out what makes a policy document easier to understand, what impedes understanding and to share findings to improve practice across the industry. 

Our linguistic researchers based in the School of English have over 20 years' experience of collaborating with industry. Their research provides vital information on how the public use and interpret language depending on their levels of education, literacy, age, gender, ethnicity and social class. 

We devised a unique academic study to examine the readability of a cross-section of insurance policies from across the market. We used a number of methods including: 

• Eye-tracking technology to understand how people read policy documents in practice. 
• Analysing the reading difficulty using seven widely used readability metrics and applying our own further analysis. 
• Testing the readers understanding with comprehension surveys. 
• Working with the drafting team at Browne Jacobson, we helped them to rewrite policies with repeated testing and analysis to test improvements to readability and comprehension.