Questions and answers

If you’re a UK resident aged between 18 and 64, you can. By UK resident we mean someone who is permanently resident in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (excluding the Channel Islands and Isle of Man).

If you’ve got cancer currently, we’re sorry but we won’t be able to offer you cover. And if you’ve had cancer in the past, we may not cover you.

That’s up to you. An easy way to approach it is, think how much you want to pay each month. Put that in our Quick Quote and see how much cover you’d get. Does it seem enough? You can play around with the figures to your heart’s content. 

You might want enough cover to pay off your mortgage, and maybe extra to help take care of your family if you couldn’t work or weren’t around. And you could think about things like paying for alternative treatment, or just taking a big holiday to find some space to get your thoughts together.

Even better. With Virgin Cancer Cover, you and your partner each get your own policy, and they’re jointly owned so we put them together in one plan for you. It gives you a big advantage over traditional ‘joint life’ cover, where once one of you makes a claim the cover ends.

With us, you each have your own ‘pot’ of cover, so a claim on one won’t affect the other. Best of all, when you and your partner apply and pay for your cover together, we’ll give you a discount.

You bet.

If you’ve got an interest only mortgage, your mortgage amount stays the same until you repay it all at the end. Level cover is designed to cover this type of mortgage. You can get this type of cover online.

If you’ve got a repayment mortgage, we can set up your cover so it reduces during the term of your cover, similar to the way your mortgage goes down, which will make your premiums cheaper. (Just so you know, we base decreasing cover on the assumption that a repayment mortgage has a yearly interest rate of 10%. This should provide sufficient cover as long as your interest rate is 10% or below). Please give us a call for decreasing cover.

If you’ve got a mix of both these types of mortgage, please give us a call.

What’s more, Virgin Cancer Cover can give you free life cover while you’re setting up your mortgage. Please see the Q&A 'Do I get free life cover while I’m setting up my mortgage?'

Most of them. We cover more types of cancer than any other company. And we pay out at earlier stages of the disease than most other companies. Here are some you may have heard of, in order of how common they are. We cover all of these, and many more.

The only cancers we don’t cover are non-melanoma skin cancers and early forms of cervical cancer. We don’t cover benign, non-malignant or pre-malignant conditions (these aren’t classified as cancer).

We can’t accept a cancer claim where the cancer started in the first 90 days of your cover. And unreasonable failure to seek or follow medical advice at any time would mean you won’t be covered.

If you’ve got cancer currently, we’re sorry but we won’t be able to offer you cover. And if you’ve had cancer in the past, we may not cover you.

Please read the policy summary or full policy wordings for more detailed information.
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Yes. If you die or become terminally ill before the end of your policy, whether it’s cancer-related or not, we’d pay whatever your cover amount is at the time.

If you’re buying a house, Virgin Cancer Cover can give you up to 90 days of life cover, absolutely free, before your policy starts. This can cover you:

• from the date you exchange contracts for the property (or if you’re buying in Scotland, the date the missives are concluded) for up to 90 days
• until the date your mortgage or Virgin Cancer Cover policy starts, whichever comes first.    

If you die while your free life cover is in place, you’d get the cover amount you applied for or £250,000, whichever is lower. Sorry, but free life cover doesn’t apply to remortgages and doesn’t provide cover for cancer or terminal ilness.

Cancer is the name given to a wide range of diseases that all work in a similar way. Body cells are constantly dying, but new cells grow and divide in your body all the time, keeping things ticking over and taking care of repair. A cancerous cell goes a little crazy – it’s different from normal cells and won’t stop growing. In some cases the cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body and grow there.

When a cancerous cell gets going, it makes more like itself. These usually form a cluster, and this growth is known as a malignant tumour. A malignant tumour is able to spread to and grow in other parts of the body. For example cells might break off and move somewhere else in your body, and start some trouble there.

Tumours can also be benign (almost always harmless). Benign tumours are unable to spread to other tissues and aren’t cancerous.

There are over 200 different types of cancer, and they all have different causes, symptoms and treatment. The four most common ones in the UK are breast, lung, large bowel and prostate cancer. These are responsible for over half of all new cancer cases. The good news is, treatments for cancer are very advanced nowadays. Survival rates have gone up nearly 20% in the last 20 years.

You’ll find detailed definitions of what is meant by these types of cancer in the policy wordings. But in a nutshell:

• ‘Early cancer’ normally means cancer that’s diagnosed early on and hasn’t spread.
• ‘Intermediate cancer’ is normally where the cancer has started to spread to surrounding healthy cells or tissue. These cancers can still have quite a good outlook.
• ‘Advanced cancer’ is when cancer has taken hold of a major organ (like the brain) or has spread to other sites around the body, meaning the disease is pretty far on, and at its most serious.  

For cancer or terminal illness claims, write to us or give us a call on 08456 01 96 45 if you think you need to make a claim. Usually this will be after you’ve visited your doctor and a specialist and had a diagnosis confirmed. We’ll help you fill in a claim form, then we’ll contact your doctor for all the info we need. Once we’ve got all the medical info we need to sort out your claim, we’ll let you know details of how much you’ll get.

If you die, your family or estate should get in touch with us as soon as possible, by phone or by writing to us, and we’ll let them know what we need to sort out the claim.

For more information about making a claim see your policy documents.

While a cancer or terminal illness claim’s being sorted out, you carry on paying premiums.

And you carry on paying your premiums as normal if we pay some, but not all, of your cover amount. This is because you’re still covered till the end of your policy term and you can claim again later if you need to.

If your full cover amount is paid out, you stop paying premiums and the cover ends.

Yes. If you apply on your own, we’ll always put a trust leaflet in your policy pack as it’s a good idea to think about this. It means any pay-out if you died goes to those you want, quicker and with less fuss. You can put your policy in trust any time once it’s up and running.

If you apply together, you both jointly own each policy, so any pay-out if you died would go straight to your partner, without you having to put it under trust. If you’re considering inheritance tax planning though, you might want to speak to a solicitor about how best to set this up.

Your premium will never alter as a result of any changes in your health or personal circumstances, or because you’ve already made a claim for cancer.

For every customer we review the cost of cancer cover on each five year anniversary of their start date. This will be based on our expectation of future claims and the cost of reinsurance. Your premium may then go up, stay the same or reduce.

It's because the statistical probability of a male making a claim under a policy is different to that of a female. Hence the different cost of insurance for males and females. For more information click here.