Acorn Group has reported gross written premium of £803 million for the year ended 31 December 2025, up 8% year-on-year and the highest annual GWP the group has recorded.
Live policy count rose 20% compared with the end of 2024, which the group attributed to a combination of strong retention and new business growth, while its combined operating ratio stayed below 90% and its solvency capital requirement rose above 160%.
As Insurance Business UK reported last week, the statutory accounts behind these figures showed pre-tax profit more than doubling to £60.5 million against a UK motor market EY has forecast will see its net combined ratio deteriorate to 108% in 2026.
This latest release fills in the operational detail behind that headline profit figure: where the premium growth is actually coming from, and how thinly it's now spread across the group's various brands.
The results mark a structural shift for Acorn, whose Car, Van and Wholesale businesses have each now individually exceeded £150 million in GWP, joining Taxi, the line the group was originally built around. Acorn was founded in 1982 and grew for decades primarily as a taxi and private hire insurance specialist, a position reinforced by its 2001 merger with Motorcade, the digital-first non-standard motor brand founded by Martin Gowing. Having three other business lines now matching that original taxi book in scale is a genuinely different shape of company to the one Acorn was even five years ago.
Kyle Tyrrell, Acorn Group's chief financial officer, said the results show the group is doing a great job supporting the growing number of drivers who sit outside mainstream motor markets. He said Acorn is pleased to have fully integrated MyPolicy, the telematics-focused young driver broker it acquired in January 2025, into the group, confirming telematics as a fundamental part of its future strategy. He pointed to the continued growth of the group's more recently launched Street Cover and Briefly brands as further evidence that a one-size-fits-all approach serves fewer drivers each year, with Briefly offering finance-free, budget-conscious cover in a similar vein to Motorcade's own non-finance product launched in 2025.
The rise in Acorn's solvency capital requirement to above 160% is worth noting alongside the GWP growth, since it suggests the group's capital base has scaled alongside its underwriting volume rather than being stretched by it, a detail regulators and reinsurance counterparties watching non-standard motor specialists tend to scrutinise closely given how quickly premium growth in this segment can outpace capital adequacy if underwriting discipline slips.
Mike Lloyd, Acorn Group's chief executive, said the 2025 performance reflects the efforts of the group's roughly 2,000 employees, up from the 1,800 headcount reported in the prior year's statutory accounts, and that an agile, tech-based approach across every brand under the group has delivered better products and customer outcomes, translating into scalable commercial success. He said the group has a pipeline of new and improved specialist products due in 2026, and thanked colleagues for their role in the group's continued growth.
Taken together with last week's profit figures, this release confirms that Acorn's growth is broadening rather than concentrating: rather than one or two brands carrying the group's expansion, four separate business lines are now each operating at meaningful scale, alongside a capital position that has strengthened rather than thinned as GWP has grown.
For brokers and MGAs watching how much further the non-standard motor and household segment can expand while the mainstream market remains loss-making, Acorn's diversification across taxi, car, van and wholesale distribution is a more informative signal than its topline GWP number alone, since it suggests the growth is coming from genuinely different pockets of underserved demand rather than one product line being pushed harder.
