Ince: Most payouts now made
The collapse of Axiom Ince is set to cost the solicitors’ profession £39m in payouts from the SRA Compensation Fund, most of which have now been made, it has emerged.
Approaching £20m was paid out in the year to 31 October 2025, according to the fund’s newly published accounts for that period, taking the total to £37.5m since the regulator shut down Axiom Ince in October 2023.
Last year, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) put the estimated final figure as high as £41m but it has now scaled that back a little.
In total, around £60m went missing from Axiom Ince and five men have been charged with various offences [1] by the Serious Fraud Office.
The fund is a discretionary fund of last resort that can pay out up to £2m where a solicitor has stolen or not accounted for client money – and it is not covered by the firm’s professional indemnity insurance – or did not have insurance in place.
The accounts show that a total of £46.4m in grants were paid in the year, £18.5m more than in the prior year, with payouts arising from the Metamorph Group collapse the other main contributor.
The majority of grants arise from claims made following an SRA intervention and in 2024/25 there were 42 interventions, compared to 59 in the previous financial year.
The collapse in February of PM Law is the latest strain on the fund, leading to a huge rise in the proposed contributions for the coming year.
Earlier this month, the SRA changed the usual formula [2] that individual solicitors and firms pay 50% each of the funding required so that individuals will this year pay 70% of it.
As a result, and subject to Legal Services Board approval, individuals will pay £170 (up from £70 in the current year) and firms £2,170 (up from £1,950).
The SRA’s costs of undertaking interventions and running the fund, which are recovered from it, were up 29% to £20.3m.
“This increase is a result of ongoing costs in relation to high volumes of client file collection, indexing, and repatriations in line with nature of interventions undertaken,” the accounts said.
The fund received or reopened 2,116 claims in the 2025 financial year (2024: 2,859) and closed 2,503 (2024: 2,718). At the end of the year there were 692 open claims (2024: 1,079) with a total claim amount of £26.4m (2024: £51.5m). These figures are subject to regular fluctuation.
The fund’s net assets on 31 October 2025 were £41.3m (2024: £44.7m). This time of the year typically represents the peak of the balance following the collection of contributions.
The regulator recovers grants where it can, primarily from the client accounts of shut-down firms, which it holds on trust for clients – totalling £48m as at 31 October – but also from the owners of those firms personally.
Once all “reasonable and proportionate efforts” have been made to trace beneficiaries, any residual balances remaining in statutory trust accounts are transferred to the fund. In 2025, this amounted to £13m.