Blog - FCA Values Measures - February 2026

Scan the FCA Value Measures and you’ll see a consistent pattern: Home Legal Expenses products with complaints ratios above 10%, low claims acceptance rates and low claims frequencies. 

The natural question is: Why?
And more importantly: Which levers can insurers actually pull to fix it?

Complaints in Home Legal aren’t random. If you work through the Financial Ombudsman’s published data or look at the excellent review the Legal Services Board undertook (link here) you find consistent themes. 

Common issues include:

• Claims declined due to “reasonable      prospects” disagreements
• Disputes over solicitor choice and hourly rates
• Technical declines customers didn’t understand at purchase
• Confusion around moratoriums, pre‑existing      disputes, and notification rules
• Poor handling, slow progress, or badly managed panel solicitors
• Misaligned expectations around what legal expenses can actually deliver

So what is noise and what is signal? And importantly how do turn this into actionable insight? This is where root cause analysis becomes your most powerful tool.

Root cause analysis forces you to ask:

• Are declines driven by customer understanding or product design?
• Are panel solicitors aligned with the insurer’s expectations?
• Is communication clear, early, and consistent? Or reactive and fragmented?
• Is ambiguity in wording unintentionally setting customers up to fail?

Fixing this is not about tweaking SLAs or rewriting a few definitions in a policy wording.
It’s about understanding where customer’s expectation and their actual outcomes become mis-aligned. 

Why this happens and crucially what actions can be taken to improve it. 

Root cause analysis is where transformation begins, because it reveals the truth behind the symptoms.

About Elevate Specialty

Elevate Specialty is a next-generation, full-stack MGA making insurance work—by design. Using technology, granular data, and relentless customer focus, Elevate creates native insurance products that people actually use and value.

We are rebuilding legal expenses, cyber, income protection and other underserved insurance classes from the ground up. Our model uses continuous improvement cycles, customer‑journey data, and rapid operational change to fix problems at the root. We deliver higher engagement, better outcomes, and lower costs by design.

More at: elevatespecialty.com