What is the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office (ELTO)?
The insurance industry formed a voluntary body called the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office (ELTO) in 2010 to pro-actively help potential claimants find any of their past Employers’ liability insurers, from this point onwards, if they have suffered injury or disease. By collating information on all employers’ liability insurance policies in a central database, ELTO aims to improve the effectiveness of finding the correct Employers’ liability insurer in the event of a claim.
How does this affect your clients?
If your clients have an Employers’ liability insurance policy, their insurance provider will need to request some additional information from them. Supplying this information is a mandatory FSA requirement.
Employers’ liability insurance is a legal requirement for most companies with employees; if they are faced with a claim ELTO will be able to prove they had the insurance at the time the claimant was employed by them. This means they will be able to claim on their insurance to cover the costs of a claim.
Which Hiscox policies are in scope for ELTO?
Commercial lines - All policies which include UK Employers’ liability (EL) cover are included in the scope of the ELTO requirements. This includes policies covering pension trustees, clubs, associations and charities. Policies for insured based in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are not included in the scope.
Personal lines - The majority of personal lines policies do not contain a commercial EL cover element and thus are not included in the requirements. However those clients’ policies used to cover home office businesses may be affected.
Events - All policies which include UK commercial EL cover are included in the scope of the ELTO requirements.
Which policy periods does it affect?
The data requirements apply to policies incepting or renewing on or after 1st April 2012. Further to the FSA policy statement (transitional provision) issued in March 2012, every new and renewed policy must have this additional data.
What data is required?
For the main policyholder and each additional employer/subsidiary company covered by the policy, the following details need to be submitted to us for ELTO:
- Employer name
- Full address of employer including post code
(where the employer is registered with Companies House, the employer’s address should be the latest address registered with Companies House) - HMRC Employer Reference Number (ERN)
The ERN is a reference number issued by HM Revenue and Customs to every employer. It is also commonly referred to as the ‘Employer PAYE Reference’. It is shown on most correspondence from HMRC to an employer and is also on the P45, P60 and P11/D documents. HMRC will also be including it on employee requests for employment history from April 2012.
For more information on the data required and the circumstances when an ERN may not be applicable please read our broker ELTO helpsheet.
Whose responsibility is it to provide the data?
It is Hiscox’s responsibility to provide the data to ELTO - brokers are not required to be members of ELTO.
How is Hiscox helping you?
We made some improvements to our systems and processes in April 2012 to help make things easier for you:
- Outstanding information report. The vast majority of our brokers receive this regular report and it now includes missing ELTO related information.
- ELTO data ‘playback’ document. With our standard policy documents, we now include a summary sheet of the ELTO related data we hold for a client. This will help you and your client identify missing information and check that what we have is correct.
- Employers liability certificate. The display of our EL certificate now includes individual names of subsidiary companies, rather than being grouped under ‘and all subsidiaries’ which was sometimes the case. This will help to ensure that the EL certificate always matches the intention of cover and that the data we send to ELTO is accurate.
Need help?
To help you with the data collection we have designed a data declaration form you can use if you wish to. It provides a complete checklist for the data that we need from your client for ELTO.
If you have any queries regarding ELTO please contact your local Hiscox team – please find our contact sheets here
For more information on ELTO visit http://www.elto.org.uk or refer to the documents below:
ELTO: data declaration form (individual policy) – 9137
ELTO: frequently asked questions - broker factsheet – 9309
ELTO: client factsheet – 9367
ELTO: BIBA broker guide
ELTO: FSA statement on tracing Employers liability insurers February 2011
