Acorn Group, the Formby-headquartered provider of car, van, taxi, fleet, motor trade and household cover, posted pre-tax profit of £60.5m for the year to December 31, 2025, more than double the previous year's figure, on revenue that climbed 55% to £177.8m, according to accounts newly filed with Companies House. Shareholders also received a substantial dividend, cited as £43m in one part of the filing and £46.2m in another - worth confirming the correct figure against the primary filing before quoting it elsewhere.
That sits oddly against what the rest of the market has been reporting. EY's July 2026 analysis confirmed UK motor insurers recorded a net combined ratio of 102% in 2025 before forecasting a deterioration to 108% in 2026, meaning insurers are paying out more than £1 for every £1 of premium they collect, and the position is set to worsen. Acorn's business sits in the non-standard segment, pricing risk that mainstream insurers tend to decline, and its numbers suggest that end of the market is behaving very differently right now.
Chief executive Mike Lloyd, writing in the annual report, said the business "continues to differentiate itself from the mainstream insurance markets" and pointed to strong renewal retention across its main product lines as a driver of growth. Acorn told a similar story a year earlier: in 2024 the group reported a 41% jump in gross written premium to £742m, alongside a combined operating ratio held below 90%, which it put down to underwriting discipline and investment in pricing and data science.
Those two premium figures are not directly comparable. £742m is gross written premium; £177.8m is statutory turnover. Acorn distributes through its own brands, including Acorn Insurance, telematics specialist Carrot and courier-focused Street Cover, and through Granite Underwriting's network of more than 200 UK brokers, with most of the underlying risk carried by Gibraltar-based Haven Insurance, part of the same group. Under that broking and MGA structure, the group's own turnover will naturally look smaller than the premium flowing through the wider Haven-underwritten book.
Headcount tells its own story about the pace of growth. Acorn employed almost 1,800 staff in 2025, up from 1,442 the year before, a rise of roughly 25% in twelve months.
There is bricks and mortar behind the growth too. Acorn bought the 81,000 sq ft, Grade I-listed Atlantic Pavilion on Liverpool's Royal Albert Dock in 2025 and is putting roughly £10m into converting the historic waterfront building into its new operational hub, with heritage specialist Donald Insall Associates and fit-out contractor ADT Workplace lined up to deliver the scheme. A planning proposal has been submitted to Liverpool City Council, and the group is targeting an early-2027 move for between 600 and 700 staff, with any surplus space sub-let to existing tenants at the site. The business currently runs out of The Lighthouse in Formby alongside offices in Manchester, Birmingham and London.
How well that bet pays off may depend on how the non-standard motor and household market holds up. Acorn's book leans heavily on higher-risk drivers: young motorists, taxi operators, van fleets. Telematics and usage-based pricing are shaping who gets covered in that space and at what cost, and regulators have not finished working out what they want to see from insurers on it. Acorn's January 2025 acquisition of MyPolicy, a telematics insurance broker specialising in young drivers and low-mileage motorists, adds capability in precisely the segment where that regulatory and competitive pressure is sharpest.
Lloyd struck a bullish note in his outlook statement: "While markets remain competitive we do expect to continue to expand the business substantially going forward." That is a bigger claim than it might look given how tight underwriting margins are elsewhere in the sector right now. Claims handling is also under pressure across the industry, with regulators and data providers pushing insurers toward faster, more granular claims intelligence as repair costs and fraud both rise.
For brokers and MGAs watching the non-standard space, Acorn's numbers are a useful gauge of how much room for growth is still there in the parts of the market the big composite insurers have been pulling back from.
