Eggar Forrester Insurance, the independent, family-run London broker, has secured a minority investment from Minority Broker Partnerships, marking what both parties described as the start of a strategic partnership designed to support the firm's growth while preserving its independence, values and leadership structure.
Eggar Forrester, led by managing director Tommy Hodgson (pictured left), specialises in property, construction, media and private client insurance, arranging cover for more than £1 billion of UK property with a client base concentrated in London. The firm traces its roots back roughly 130 years, and Hodgson has run the business since 2014 after joining from Marsh.
This is the sixth investment Minority Broker Partnerships has completed in ten months, and its pace has been unusually fast even by the standards of a sector accustomed to consolidation.
The firm, led by insurance veteran Peter Cullum and chief executive James McCaffrey (pictured right), signed four deals in quick succession at the end of 2025, taking stakes in drone specialist MGA Moonrock, Tree Surgeon & Forestry Insurance Services, Sturdy Edwards and Cyber Cover, before opening 2026 with an investment in RAW.
MBP is targeting at least £80 million in gross written premium across its portfolio by the end of 2026, with McCaffrey and Cullum indicating the eventual figure is likely to exceed that based on the firm's ongoing deal pipeline.
Cullum and McCaffrey previously worked together at Minority Venture Partners, and MBP represents their reunion in the intermediary investment space after the broker investment market shifted, with younger brokers and niche specialists increasingly coming to the fore as private equity and bank-backed consolidators pull back some of their earlier support for the sector.
Unlike a full acquisition, MBP's minority-stake approach leaves Eggar Forrester's existing leadership and day-to-day decision-making intact, a structure that appears to be a deliberate differentiator in how the firm pitches itself to family-run and founder-led brokers.
For a business built on long-standing personal relationships in specialist areas like private client and media insurance, retaining that independence while gaining backing for growth is a meaningfully different proposition to being folded into a larger consolidator's operating structure, where branding, systems and client-facing teams are often integrated over time.
Tommy Hodgson said the investment marks an exciting milestone for the business, describing the team he has built as fantastic, with loyal clients and strong insurer relationships. He said finding a partner who shared the firm's values and understood what makes Eggar Forrester distinctive was important as the business considered its next stage of growth, and that Cullum, McCaffrey and the wider MBP team bring significant experience building successful insurance businesses.
Hodgson said their support, expertise and network would help Eggar Forrester continue investing in its people and strengthen the service, resources and market access available to clients.
James McCaffrey, chief executive of MBP, said he and Cullum were delighted to invest in a family-run business whose values and culture closely align with their own, calling it their sixth investment in the past ten months and expressing enthusiasm about helping Hodgson and his team progress to the next stage of their growth.
What stands out about MBP's approach across its six deals so far is the deliberate breadth: drone insurance, tree surgery and forestry cover, cyber, and now a 130-year-old family property and private client broker all sit within the same portfolio.
That spread suggests MBP is backing operators with strong niche reputations and defensible client relationships rather than pursuing a single sector thesis, a strategy that will be tested as the firm scales toward its stated GWP target and has to manage a genuinely diverse set of businesses under one investment umbrella rather than a more easily integrated set of similar brokerages.
