February 19 2025
Draft business plan for 2025/26 – Delivering meaningful oversight
The past year has been an extremely productive one for the ECB. With the help and input from our partners across the sector (from the enforcement industry itself, debt advice sector, creditors and other oversight and regulatory bodies), we have achieved some significant milestones in pursuit of our mission, including:
- Launching new standards for Enforcement Agents and, for the first time, for Enforcement Firms
- Publishing ground-breaking independent research analysing levels of compliance with the National Standards when Enforcement Agents interact with members of the public to enforce debts
- Developing our framework for handling complaints from members of the public who feel that they have not been treated fairly through enforcement and starting to handle complaints under this framework
- Increasing the reach of our accreditation scheme so that we now have approximately 96% of the market under our oversight
- Securing further commitments from a wide range of creditors to only work with ECB accredited providers, ensuring that ECB accreditation is a market imperative for enforcement firms.
With these foundations laid, we have today launched a consultation on our draft business plan, which sets out what we plan to achieve in the financial year ahead. And, as ever, we are hoping for more engagement and input from our stakeholders to help us to shape and refine our plans.
The overarching focus for 2025/26 will be on successful delivery of operational oversight. In other words, having built the core standards and built the frameworks, we now need to do the things that we have said we would do and do them well, with impact and with purpose.
In practice, there will be three main areas of work for the ECB over the coming year:
- Complaints – ensuring we deliver a high-quality complaints service through the first full year of operation
- Standards – embedding the ECB’s standards and developing and bringing in new standards on vulnerability and ability to pay
- Oversight – developing and implementing our approach to proactive oversight, to ensure that the ECB’s standards are being adhered to, including running a pilot of oversight visits to enforcement firms.
The ECB is of course funded entirely by the enforcement industry. We have already collected three rounds of levies. As we have previously trailed, for the coming year, the ECB’s budget will need to increase. This is because now that we are fully operational, we have new staff, new teams and new systems in place to deliver operational oversight. The staff team at the ECB for the coming year will comprise just short of 9 full time equivalent members of staff. We will remain a remote organisation.
Taking account of these changes, our draft budget for the year ahead is £1.4m, which is an increase of around 17% on last year.
We have been careful to keep the increase proportionate and as low as possible. Because we recognise the economic context that the enforcement industry is facing, with fees having remained static for 10 years whilst others costs have continued to rise. We also recognise that compliance with the ECB’s new standards will be leading to other costs for firms beyond simply paying the levy.
Nonetheless, it remains critical that the ECB is funded sufficiently to deliver our mission and the draft budget will allow for this.
The consultation paper can be found on our website here. The deadline for responses is 12 March 2025. I really hope that everyone with a stake in the enforcement sector and an interest in fair enforcement will be able to check it out and let us know what you think. We really do value and rely on feedback to help us ensure that we are doing the best possible job to pursue our crucial mission.
Until next time,
Chris