The Employers' Liability Tracing Office — What It Is and Why It Matters
When a worker in Scotland suffers an injury or develops an industrial disease as a result of their employer's negligence, the normal route to compensation is straightforward in principle — the employer's liability insurer meets the claim, and the worker receives compensation without needing to worry about whether the employer can afford to pay. The system of compulsory employers' liability insurance, discussed in detail elsewhere in this series, is designed precisely to ensure that this route is always available.
But what happens when the employer no longer exists — when the company has been dissolved, wound up, or otherwise ceased to trade — and the identity of the insurer who provided their employers' liability cover is unknown? Without knowing who the insurer is, there is no one to claim against, and the worker's right to compensation, however well-founded in law, cannot be enforced in practice. For workers with industrial diseases like mesothelioma, asbestosis, and industrial deafness — conditions that develop decades after the exposure that caused them, by which time the employing company may have been gone for thirty or forty years — this is not a theoretical problem. It is the practical reality that many claimants and their solicitors face at the outset of a claim.
The Employers' Liability Tracing Office — universally known as ELTO — was created specifically to address this problem. It is the mechanism through which the insurance policies that covered an employer's liability can be identified and located, enabling claimants to direct their claims to the right insurer and to access the compensation to which they are entitled. Understanding what ELTO is, how it works, what its limitations are, and what happens when it does not produce a result is essential knowledge for anyone dealing with historical workplace injury or industrial disease claims in Scotland.
What Is the Employers' Liability Tracing Office?
The Employers' Liability Tracing Office is a not-for-profit organisation established by the insurance industry in 1999 to help people identify the insurer who provided employers' liability cover to a former employer. It operates a database — the Employers' Liability Register — which contains details of employers' liability insurance policies held by insurers who are members of the Association of British Insurers and Lloyd's of London.
ELTO was established as a voluntary industry initiative in response to growing recognition that the absence of a central register of employers' liability policies was creating a significant access to justice problem for injured workers and industrial disease claimants. Before ELTO existed, identifying the insurer for a defunct employer was a matter of detective work — searching through archived records, approaching individual insurers speculatively, consulting trade associations, and hoping that someone somewhere had kept a record of the relevant policy. For many claimants, that process was fruitless, and valid claims were never pursued because the insurer could not be found.
The establishment of ELTO, and the subsequent creation of the mandatory Employers' Liability Register under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Regulations 1998 as amended, represented a significant improvement in the infrastructure supporting employers' liability claims. By centralising policy information in a searchable database, ELTO created a single point of access for tracing the insurance coverage of former employers — a resource that has enabled the pursuit of thousands of claims that would otherwise have been impossible to bring.
The Employers' Liability Register
The Employers' Liability Register is the database at the heart of ELTO's operation. It is maintained by ELTO and populated with policy data uploaded by member insurers. The register contains details of employers' liability insurance policies including the name and Companies House registration number of the insured employer, the period of cover, and the identity of the insurer.
Member insurers are required under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Regulations 1998 — as amended by the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) (Amendment) Regulations 2008 — to upload details of their employers' liability policies to the register. The obligation to upload applies to policies currently in force and to historical policies going back to 1999 for most purposes, though the upload of pre-1999 historical policies is encouraged on a voluntary basis and many insurers have uploaded significant volumes of historical data.
The register can be searched by the name of the employer or by the employer's Companies House registration number. A search produces details of any policies held on the register that match the search criteria — the insurer, the policy number, and the period of cover. Where a match is found, the claimant's solicitor can approach the identified insurer directly to notify the claim and begin the claims process.
Access to the ELTO database for the purposes of tracing insurance policies for claims is available to claimants and their legal representatives through ELTO's website. The search facility is designed to be accessible to solicitors handling employers' liability claims and to claimants acting on their own behalf. There is no charge for conducting a search.
How the Search Works in Practice
In practice, the ELTO database search is one of the first steps taken by a specialist industrial disease or workplace accident solicitor when a potential claim is identified involving a former employer. The search is conducted using whatever information is available about the employer — their full company name, any trading names they used, their Companies House registration number if known, and the period of employment during which the relevant exposure occurred.
The quality and reliability of the results depend on the completeness of the data that has been uploaded to the register. Where the employer was a substantial company with a good record-keeping history and the insurer has fully complied with its upload obligations, the search will typically return a clear result identifying the insurer and the relevant policy. Where the employer was a smaller company, a sole trader, or a company that ceased trading many decades ago, the search may return no result — either because no policy data has been uploaded for that employer, because the policy predates the period covered by the register, or because the insurer who provided the cover is no longer in business.
Where the search returns a positive result, the solicitor will approach the identified insurer and notify the claim, providing details of the claimant, the period of employment, the nature of the exposure, the condition diagnosed, and the basis of the claim. The insurer will then investigate the claim and respond on liability in the usual way.
Where the search returns multiple results — where the employer had different insurers during different periods of the claimant's employment — the solicitor will notify each insurer of the claim and the apportionment of liability between the different periods of cover will be addressed as part of the claims process. In industrial disease claims involving multiple insurers covering different periods of exposure, the apportionment of the overall noise dose or asbestos exposure between the different policy periods is an important part of the claims preparation.
The Limitations of the ELTO Database
Despite its significant value in enabling the tracing of employers' liability insurance, the ELTO database has a number of important limitations that mean it does not solve every tracing problem.
The temporal coverage of the register is limited. While insurers are required to upload details of policies from 1999 onwards, and many have uploaded voluntary historical data going back further, the register does not comprehensively cover the full period of employment history that is relevant in many industrial disease claims. A claimant who was exposed to asbestos in a Clyde shipyard in the 1960s and 1970s and who develops mesothelioma decades later needs insurance data going back fifty or sixty years — a period that predates the register by decades. For these historical claims, the ELTO database is a starting point rather than a complete solution, and supplementary investigation methods are often needed.
The completeness of the data uploaded by individual insurers varies. Some insurers have uploaded comprehensive historical data going back many decades. Others have uploaded only the minimum required by the regulations. Some historic insurers — companies that wrote significant volumes of employers' liability business in the mid-twentieth century — no longer exist or have become insolvent, and their policy data may have been lost or may not have been uploaded to the register by any successor entity.
The reliability of the employer identification data in the register depends on the accuracy of the information originally recorded in the policy. Where an employer traded under multiple names, where there were corporate restructurings during the period of cover, or where the company registration details were not clearly linked to the policy, searches may fail to identify relevant policies that actually exist in the register.
These limitations mean that a negative ELTO search result does not necessarily mean that no employers' liability insurance exists for a particular employer and period. It means that no matching policy has been found in the register as currently constituted. Further investigation is always warranted before concluding that no insurance can be traced.
What Happens When ELTO Does Not Produce a Result?
Where the ELTO search does not identify an insurer for the relevant employer and period, the investigation does not end — it continues through a range of supplementary methods aimed at locating the insurance coverage through other means.
Companies House records are an important supplementary source. The filing history of a dissolved company at Companies House may include references to insurers in the company's accounts, in correspondence, or in other documents on the company's file. Former directors of dissolved companies may be identifiable through Companies House records and may have information about the insurance arrangements of the company during the relevant period.
Trade union records are potentially valuable in historical industrial disease claims. Many workers in Scotland's heavy industries were members of trade unions — the TGWU, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Boilermakers, the National Union of Mineworkers — and trade union archives may contain information about the insurance arrangements of employers in their industries during the relevant periods. Some trade unions actively assist with industrial disease claims and maintain their own databases of employer insurance information.
Former colleagues who worked for the same employer during the same period may have knowledge of the insurance arrangements or may have pursued their own claims against the same employer, in which case the identity of the insurer may already have been established in previous litigation. Solicitors who regularly handle industrial disease claims build up institutional knowledge of the insurers who provided cover to major employers in specific industries and localities, and that accumulated knowledge can sometimes short-circuit the formal search process.
The Association of British Insurers may be able to provide guidance on which insurers were active in particular markets during particular periods, even where they cannot identify a specific policy. This contextual information can help to narrow the field of potential insurers to approach.
Solicitors who specialise in industrial disease litigation sometimes maintain their own databases of employer-insurer relationships built up from their own caseload and from the shared experience of the specialist industrial disease litigation community. These informal knowledge networks can be a valuable supplement to the formal ELTO database search.
The Financial Services Compensation Scheme
Where an insurer that provided employers' liability cover has itself become insolvent — where the company that wrote the relevant policy no longer exists and has not been acquired by a solvent successor — the Financial Services Compensation Scheme becomes relevant. The FSCS is the UK's statutory compensation scheme of last resort for customers of failed financial services firms, and it covers employers' liability insurance claims where the insurer is insolvent and the FSCS has declared a default.
A number of insurers that wrote significant volumes of employers' liability business in the mid-twentieth century — particularly those that took on large volumes of asbestos-related risk — subsequently became insolvent as the scale of asbestos disease claims became apparent. The FSCS handles claims against these insolvent insurers and pays compensation at one hundred percent of the claim value for employers' liability insurance claims.
Where the ELTO search or supplementary investigation identifies an insurer but that insurer is insolvent, the solicitor will check whether the FSCS has declared a default in relation to that insurer and, if so, will submit the claim to the FSCS for handling. The FSCS has its own claims process and its own timescales, and experience of navigating the FSCS process is a valuable attribute in a solicitor handling historical industrial disease claims.
The Diffuse Mesothelioma Payment Scheme and the 1979 Act
Where no employers' liability insurance can be identified for a mesothelioma claim despite exhaustive use of ELTO and all supplementary investigation methods, the Diffuse Mesothelioma Payment Scheme — established under the Mesothelioma Act 2014 — provides a route to compensation funded by a levy on current employers' liability insurers. As discussed in the essay on mesothelioma claims, the scheme pays lump sum awards at a percentage of average civil damages for mesothelioma in the relevant age bracket and is available where the civil route through an identified insurer is genuinely unavailable.
For dust-related lung diseases other than mesothelioma — asbestosis, pneumoconiosis, and other prescribed conditions — where no employer or insurer can be found, the Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers' Compensation) Act 1979 provides statutory lump sum payments from the Department for Work and Pensions. These payments are lower than civil damages but provide a measure of compensation in cases where the civil route is genuinely exhausted.
ELTO and the Broader Claims Infrastructure
ELTO does not operate in isolation — it is one component of a broader infrastructure supporting employers' liability claims in Scotland and across the UK. The Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010, which allows injured workers to claim directly against insurers where the employer is insolvent, provides the legal mechanism that makes the insurance tracing exercise practically useful. Without the ability to claim directly against the insurer, tracing the policy would produce the identity of a potential defendant but no practical route to compensation.
The Companies House register, the FSCS, the Diffuse Mesothelioma Payment Scheme, the 1979 Act, and Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit together form a network of overlapping mechanisms that, taken together, ensure that the vast majority of workers with legitimate employers' liability claims can access some form of compensation — even where the employer no longer exists and the insurance is difficult to trace.
The skill of the specialist industrial disease solicitor lies in knowing how to navigate all of these mechanisms in combination — how to use ELTO as the starting point, how to pursue the supplementary investigation methods when ELTO produces no result, how to engage with the FSCS where the insurer is insolvent, and how to access the statutory schemes where the civil route is genuinely unavailable. This navigation requires experience, persistence, and a thorough understanding of the full landscape of employers' liability compensation — knowledge that is built up over years of specialist practice in this field.
The Bottom Line
The Employers' Liability Tracing Office is one of the most important practical tools in the industrial disease and historical workplace accident claims landscape in Scotland. It provides a centralised, searchable database of employers' liability insurance policies that enables claimants and their solicitors to identify the insurer responsible for meeting a claim — a function that is essential in a claims system built on compulsory insurance but lacking any historical central record of who insured whom.
ELTO is not a complete solution. Its coverage of historical policies is imperfect, its data is only as complete as the information uploaded by member insurers, and a negative search result does not mean that no insurance exists. But as a starting point for tracing employers' liability insurance in historical claims, it is indispensable — and understanding what it is, how to use it, and what to do when it does not produce a result is fundamental knowledge for anyone dealing with workplace injury or industrial disease claims involving employers who are no longer in business.
For any worker in Scotland with an industrial disease or a historical workplace injury claim, the message is clear. The dissolution of your former employer does not dissolve your rights. The absence of an obvious insurer does not mean there is no insurer. The ELTO database exists precisely to bridge the gap between the right to compensation and the practical ability to enforce it — and specialist solicitors with experience in industrial disease litigation know how to use it and how to go beyond it when it is not enough.