The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) has recovered just under £300m over the past five years from failed financial services firms, it has revealed today.

It says the recoveries have reduced FSCS levies on firms.

FSCS also said it had recovered billions of pounds “following the resolutions of the 2008 banking failures, where FSCS needed to take out loans totalling approximately £20bn from the Government at the time of the financial crisis”.

The body says the loans have now been repaid in full, “largely through FSCS’s recoveries work”.

A statement from the FSCS read: “In order to reduce the costs of compensation for its levy payers, FSCS seeks to recover amounts paid in compensation from any party that it considers has a legal responsibility.

“As part of the process of paying compensation, the legal rights of our customers are transferred to FSCS.

“FSCS then ‘stands in the shoes’ of its customers in pursuing any recovery action.

“A recovery action is a legal claim which FSCS pursues in order to recover the compensation it has paid to customers, whether through a formal insolvency process, through litigation or some form of dispute resolution.

“In pursuing recoveries, FSCS must apply what is in essence a commercial test – is the recovery worth pursuing, and is the defendant good for the money?

“It doesn’t pursue recoveries just to make a point or to punish the parties in question.”

In taking recoveries action, FSCS says it increasingly deals with a number of other Government agencies, such as the FCA, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the Insolvency Service.

FSCS also deals very regularly with a wide range of insolvency practitioners.

FSCS came under fire recently after revealing its levy is expected to cost advisers £175m for the 2019/20 financial year. 

Chartered Financial Planner Martin Bamford, managing director of Informed Choice, branded the organisation “a giant regulatory train wreck” in a recent column for Financial Planning Today. 

Mark Neale, CEO of FSCS, commented: “Recoveries are an unsung part of FSCS’s vital work of compensating customers and contributing to confidence in financial services.

“I am very proud of the professionalism of our Recoveries Team in navigating complex cases to successful outcomes.

“Recoveries will play an essential role in our new strategy for the 2020s.”

James Darbyshire, FSCS’s general counsel, who leads on FSCS’s recoveries work, said: “The usual avenues of recovery we pursue include actions against the firms we’ve declared in default, and their Professional Indemnity insurers.

“Increasingly, however, we are taking ever more complex recoveries action, and in those instances we tend to make use of our panel of law firms, who have both the expertise and jurisdictional reach to assist us.”