What the licence actually means
Only a licensed insolvency practitioner can be appointed to wind up a company, take it into
administration, act as monitor of a moratorium or supervise a company voluntary arrangement. That
is not a professional convention. Section 389 of the Insolvency Act 1986 makes acting as an
insolvency practitioner without being qualified an offence punishable by a fine or imprisonment.
Advising you about insolvency, by contrast, is not reserved at all. Anyone can set up as a business
rescue adviser, market themselves on the same search terms as a licensed practice, take your call,
and then place the case with a practitioner from a panel. That is lawful and sometimes useful, but
it means the people you speak to first are not the people who take the appointment, and you are
paying for an introduction.
How this list was built
The Insolvency Service publishes a register of insolvency practitioners. It was read on 20 September
2026 and returned 1,413 practitioners working at 441 separate practices once the trading names had
been resolved to the businesses behind them.
That register is the first gate. It is not the only one, because an insolvency licence covers
personal insolvency as well as corporate, so the large IVA providers hold genuine licences and sit
on the register alongside corporate practices. A director trying to close a limited company has no
use for an IVA provider, so a second gate checks each practice’s own website for corporate
insolvency work, and twenty-five practices were excluded on that test.
What survives is ranked on four things, in order: how many licensed practitioners the firm has, how
many council areas it can act in from a real office, how many of the formal procedures it takes
appointments in rather than referring out, and whether it acts for owner-managed companies at all.
Where the brochure and the register disagree
Checking the credential rather than repeating the claim is the whole point of this page, so it is
worth saying what that turned up.
Begbies Traynor says it has almost 100 licensed insolvency practitioners, and the register counts
exactly 100. That is the closest match on the list. Its office network is the other way round: the
site advertises more than a hundred locations, its own offices page marks a large share of them as
satellite offices open by appointment only, and the register finds practitioners based at 35.
Leonard Curtis claims 30 offices and the register finds 16. FRP claims 33 and the register finds 21.
Moorfields lists five and the register finds three. None of that is dishonest. A firm counts every
address it can meet you at, while the register counts only where a licensed practitioner is
registered, and those are different questions. It is worth knowing which one you are being told.
Two things this page cannot tell you
Inclusion in the register is voluntary. It holds the practitioners who agreed to publication, which
means a real practice can be missing from it. Nothing on this site should be read as saying a firm
that is not listed here is unlicensed.
The register also does not say who can actually take an appointment. Of the 1,480 practitioners
authorised in the UK at 1 January 2026, 1,262 were appointment takers, so more than two hundred
licence holders cannot be appointed to anything. Which two hundred is not published. So this page
can tell you that a firm employs licensed practitioners, and it cannot tell you that any particular
one of them is free to take your case. Ask.
