Legal & General has made changes to its critical illness cover to incorporate the Association of British Insurers’ Statement of Best Practice 2014.

The insurer has also added a new illness, spinal stroke, to its definitions and improved its motor neurone disease cover so it now exceeds the ABI definition.

This change increases the total number of illnesses covered to 42 – 17 of which are ABI+. A number of illnesses have also received minor definition wording changes, to bring them in line with the latest ABI Statement of Best Practice.

To support these changes, Legal & General has improved its interactive online tool, AnatoME, to provide advisers with facts about the different illnesses that its policies cover.

Mark Holweger (pictured), managing director of partnerships at Legal & General Insurance, said: “As the UK’s number one CIC provider , we paid over £161m in CIC claims for 2014, which is 16% of the ABI total 2014 CIC claims paid by all insurers.

“We believe the changes being introduced as a result of the latest ABI Statement of Best Practice will help bring greater clarity in some areas and make it easier for advisers and their customers, to fully understand our latest critical illness product and the cover it provides.

“We’re proud to be adding motor neurone disease to our 17 ABI+ definitions and spinal stroke as a new illness to increase our critical illness cover to 42 full payment definitions, so we can now pay even more claims and help more customers get some financial help when they need it most.

“These improvements, will increase the other reasons customers can claim alongside the top four reasons, where last year over 85% of our claims were for cancer, stroke, heart attack and multiple sclerosis, totalling £130 million of the £161 million paid in claims to our customers.”