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Major insights into the impact of regulation
Every two years, the UK’s adviser trade association, The Impartial Financial Advisers Association, creates a report on the availability of professional advice to UK consumers. This report is created from desktop research via already published information combined with a major survey into the attitude of adviser firms.
As the UK probably has the most invasive type of regulation, this report is received not only in the UK but across the world. The concept was created in 2015 after the UK regulator decided to arbitrarily change the advice market. These changes destroyed advice access to over 12m modestly-paid consumers.
The Heath Report Four survey (THR4) has doubled its respondents between THR2 and THR4. This year we had full responses from 295 firms representing 1,319 advisers. Only 5% of respondents described their firms as focussing on mortgages and/or protection
The Heath Report Four will be launched later this month but we have some of the early results.
The prime headline issue is how many UK consumers are using the professional advice sector. One might guess that the numbers would drop due to COVID and losing 950 advisers in the period, but bizarrely, sector capacity has increased by 1.2m new clients, to 6.1m.
This is really good news. The more consumers we handle - the more important advisers are to the UK Finance Ministry and...
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