Were you wrongly advised to enter an IVA?

An Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) can be the right option for some people but for many, it isn’t. Thousands have been steered into IVAs when cheaper, simpler solutions like a Debt Relief Order (DRO) or even bankruptcy were more suitable. This is called negligent advice or mis-selling. If this happened to you, you may be entitled to recover thousands of pounds.

How were IVAs mis-sold?

• Conflict of interest: Insolvency practitioners (IPs) and debt-packager firms often had financial incentives to push IVAs.
• Poor advice: Many clients were never told about DROs or bankruptcy or were led to believe that an IVA was their only choice.
• Unsustainable arrangements: IVAs frequently fail within the first few years, leaving people worse off than before.
• Fees first: In some cases, most of the money clients paid went straight to IVA supervision fees, not to clearing debts.

What the regulator says:

In June 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) banned debt-packager firms from receiving referral fees from IVA providers, after finding evidence that consumers were being pushed into unsuitable solutions.

• The FCA reported that median referral fees for IVAs were around £940 per case, creating a strong incentive to recommend IVAs over cheaper options like DROs (which cost only a nominal fee — the £90 DRO fee was scrapped in the 2024 Budget).
• The FCA highlighted evidence that some debt-packagers manipulated people’s income and outgoings to make them look “IVA-eligible,” while failing to present alternative solutions.
• These practices are now prohibited, but anyone advised into an IVA before October 2023 may have been affected.

Who may have a claim?

You may be eligible if:

• Your total debts were under £50,000.
• You had little or no spare income (under £75/month).
• Your assets were under £2,000 (excluding a car worth up to £4,000).
• You were advised into a 5 to 6-year IVA instead of being told about DRO or bankruptcy.

We are particularly investigating claims against major IVA providers including CreditFix, The Insolvency Group, and Hanover Insolvency.

What compensation could you receive?

• Refund of IVA fees and payments (often £2,000–£5,000 or more).
• Relief from debts that should have been written off much earlier.

How we handle claims

We are building a large-scale campaign to help consumers affected by IVA mis-selling. In some cases, we may pursue claims individually. In many cases, we will combine claims into groups or progress them as part of a wider action, to make the process more efficient and cost-effective. We may also run a small number of individual cases first to test the issues before scaling up.

Why choose us?

• We act on a no win, no fee basis.
• If your claim is unsuccessful, you pay nothing.
• If successful, you keep the majority of what we recover.
• We are experienced in large-scale consumer mis-selling claims and group actions.