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The new Employee Liability Tracing Office - Mar 2011
On 1 April 2011 there is to be a significant change to the administration of employers’ liability insurance. This article provides background information and how it will impact on your business.
Anyone who is injured or develops a disease in the course of their employment can, assuming the employer is responsible, claim compensation from their employer’s insurers.
However it often takes industrial disease issues many years to become apparent and, during the intervening period, the responsible employer may have gone out of business or, if they are still trading, may not have retained records of their historic employers’ liability insurance.
As a consequence of this, claimants can be left without compensation and those employers who continue to trade but cannot identify the relevant insurer are left to meet or defend claims out of their own funds, in spite of the fact that they have a paid a premium to a now unidentified insurer. More often than not, this is a very expensive experience.
To address this problem, the Government has asked insurers to create a centralised, searchable database of employers’ liability insurance records. The facility will be known as the ELTO and it will be the responsibility of insurers to populate the database.
The database will contain the policy details which will be allocated against each insured employer. However, to ensure the database is accurate, it will list insured subsidiaries separately. Further, the database will also record the Employers Reference Number (ERN) for all insured employers, including subsidiaries. The ERN is commonly referred to as the “Employer PAYE Reference”.
Whilst there is a phased introduction of the database and compulsory population of both subsidiaries and ERNs will not start until April 2012, the reality is that a number of insurers will start submitting full data from 1 April 2011.
Accordingly, for policies providing employers’ liability insurance renewing and/or incepting from 1 April 2011 we will be required to obtain this information from you and submit it to insurers on your behalf. You need not do anything at this point, we will approach you for the data at the appropriate time.
