How to find ethical pet insurance
The insurance industry is huge, not just in terms of sales each year. Insurers often hold vast investments in other companies, as we have explained in our home insurance guide. In the UK alone, insurance companies manage investments equivalent to around 25% of the country’s net worth.
This means that they are indirectly financing everything from fossil fuels to the sales of arms. In this guide, we have tried to find the pet insurance companies with the most ethical approach to investment.
This guide covers 7 brands of underwriters, including the big players like PetPlan and familiar insurers like Aviva and MORE TH>N. Like our other insurance guides, it's unfortunately a low scoring market.
Difference between insurance brokers and underwriters
There are two types of insurance company: brokers and underwriters.
Brokers sell policies on behalf of one or more underwriters, and include well known brands such as Co-op, Sainsbury and Animal Friends. Brokers make money by receiving a commission from the underwriter, once a policy is sold.
Underwriters are the companies that take most of the money from an insurance premium, but which also pay out when something goes wrong. They may not be as visible as the broker’s insurance brand. But they wield a significant amount of power in the global economy.
We only cover underwriters in this guide because these are the companies that hold the assets and which, therefore, create policy on whether to make ethical investment decisions. They can also create policy on whether or not to insure coal plants and other controversial projects.
What to look out for?
In the UK alone, there are hundreds of brokers – too many to include in our reports, so our ranking tables only include underwriting companies.
Unfortunately, most of us will buy our policy through a broker, so you may have to do some extra digging. You can find the underwriter by looking at the ‘Key Facts’ document that the broker must provide when you are deciding to take out a policy.
Comparison sites like Money Supermarket and Go.Compare (our current favourites) will also either provide these documents or tell you who the underwriter is.
Ethical investment policies at pet insurance underwriters
Our Investment Policy rating rewarded companies for having policies which restricted the types of companies they invested in.
We looked for exclusions on:
- fossil fuels
- arms
- factory farming
- companies involved in human rights and workers’ rights abuses.
Most insurance companies have some basic kind of ethical investment or exclusion policy and so scored 20/100. Only Aviva scored more because it also excluded companies which did not meet the standards of the UN Global Compact (which contained criteria on workers' rights).
Pet insurance companies and Israel
AXA has been the subject of a boycott since 2016.
Although AXA divested fully from Elbit Systems (a leading Israeli arms manufacturer) in 2019 and from Israeli banks in 2024, the boycott remains in place, however, as recent research showed that in June 2024 the company held at least $150m of investments in eleven weapons manufacturers linked to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Allianz and Aviva, while not subject to a boycott, also hold investments in weapons manufacturers supplying Israel. According to the Boycott Bloody Insurance report, in February 2025, Allianz held over $450m worth of investments in 15 companies supplying the Israeli military, and the amount of its investment nearly doubled during the course of 2024. The report also identified Allianz as providing insurance to Elbit Systems.
Of nine insurance companies, in the Boycott Bloody Insurnace report, Aviva had by far the largest amount investments in arms companies, holding over $880m in February 2025. The report concluded that the three companies could be “considered substantially complicit in fuelling the assault on Palestinians”.
Tax avoidance
Tax avoidance strategies appear to be prevalent in the industry.
Apart from Admiral and NFU Mutual, all the other companies in our guide showed signs of likely use of tax avoidance and so scored 0/100 in the Tax Conduct category.
NFU Mutual scored 70/100 as it did have subsidiaries in tax havens, however it had a clear statement that it didn’t use them for tax avoidance purposes.
Admiral had one subsidiary in a tax haven and we found no explanation of its presence there or statement that it didn’t engage in tax avoidance so it scored 20/100.
