Information on mortgages and pure protection - December 2025

Please provide the following information:

1. The number of mortgage brokers with permissions for protection from 2015 to 2025.
2. The number of mortgage brokers without permissions for protection, so solely mortgages, from 2015 to 2025.
3. The number of protection-only firms from 2015 to 2025.

My request relates to mortgage broker activity relating to ‘pure’ protection products, such as critical illness, income protection and life insurance. Basically, mortgage brokers arranging protection for customers, advising on them and evaluating policies at key points.

The focus of the request is on brokers who are authorised to undertake both mortgage and protection business, as well as those authorised only for mortgage activity. 

Please provide information covering date ranges beginning on 1 January.

Before considering our response, please note that we are unable to provide information on firms offering ‘pure protection’ as our data is not broken down in that way.  However, we can identify firms that have the regulated activities that would allow them to offer services usually referred to as an insurance intermediary. Therefore, the information provided below includes firms that were identified as holding one or more of the regulated activities shown below.

Please also note the following:

• Even though a firm may hold one or more of these permissions, this does not mean that they are categorised as ‘mortgage brokers’ or 'insurance brokers’, as they may also hold other unrelated permissions as their primary activity.
• A firm may have held permission for these activities in any particular year but may not have undertaken any regulated business in that year.
• 'Insurance brokers’ in this list are simply those that have permission to undertake insurance intermediary type activities and not specifically protection products.

To identify the firms in scope of the request we have searched for firms that hold permissions for any of the following regulated activities:

• Advising on regulated mortgage contracts;
• Advising on investments (excluding pension transfers/opt outs)
• Arranging (bringing about) regulated mortgage contracts;
• Arranging (bringing about) deals in investments
• Making Arrangements
• Assisting in administration of insurance
• Dealing in investments as agent

Where relevant, we have split these out using the following regulated activity categories:

• Insurance Distribution
• Regulated Home Finance

In light of the above, the information you have requested is provided in the table below.