Advisers operating in the health and protection insurance industries will not now be charged with funding the regulator’s advice guidance boundary review (AGBR).
Fee rates for advisers will also be trimmed slightly although the total value of regulatory fees has risen for the current financial year.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) made the move after being petitioned to ensure only those sectors involved in the project would be paying for it.
It will only mean a small financial saving for firms as the whole A.19 fee block of general insurance intermediaries, which includes health and protection advisers, was only due to pay a share of the estimated £700,000 required for implementing the simplified advice regime.
However, should any further significant fees or charges arise from this, it should mean the A.19 fee payers are initially insulated from that.
In 2025-26 the FCA spent £3.7m on its overall advice guidance boundary review work.
This is projected to shrink to around £2m in 2026-27, with around £700,000 for simplified advice work, including the A.19 and five other fee blocks, and £1.3m for targeted support from three fee blocks.
In its latest fees and levies update for the 2026/27 financial year, the FCA said: “One trade body asked why we had included fee-block A.19 in our proposals for recovering AGBR (simplified advice) exceptional project costs.
“General insurance is out of scope for this project, so we have removed fee-block A.19 from funding it.”
Fee value up, rates down
The FCA also confirmed that its annual funding requirement (AFR) from advisers in the A.19 block will rise by 1.3% to £39.3m for 2026-27, up from £38.8m last year.
However, the rate at which firms will pay their fees has dipped by 5.1% to £1.51 per £1,000 of annual income.
This is because the total income from firms in this block is expected to rise 6.3% to £26.4bn from £24.8bn, all while the number of firms drops by 3.7% to 10,689.
A rebate of £4.2m is also being applied to the A.19 fees as a result of penalties and fines taken from firms in the block.
The FCA was also asked why the A.19 and other fee blocks were seeing an increase of more than the 1% generally seen across the board.
“The AFR allocated to fee-blocks A.18 and A.19 has increased above 1% because both fee-blocks are contributing to exceptional projects (cryptoassets, Smarter Regulatory Framework and InvestSmart) that have had increased budgets,” it said.
Overall, the FCA’s AFR for 2026/27 is £788.9m – up by 0.7% or £5.4m from £783.5m last year.
The minimum fee payable by all firms authorised in any A fee block will be £2,200 for this year.