Insolvency Practitioner Fees: When Nobody Can Mark the Homework The Judge Will

The recent Float Capital Ltd, In the Matter Of [2026] EWHC 1891 (Ch) judgment is not simply another decision about insolvency practitioners’ remuneration. It is a reminder that where the normal commercial safeguard of creditor approval disappears, the court becomes the vigilant gatekeeper.

The application itself arose because almost 98% of the unsecured debt was owed to a creditor whose own joint administrator was also one of the proposed recipients of the remuneration. That conflict made ordinary creditor approval effectively impractical. As the judge recognised, it would have been inappropriate for someone to have an effective hand in approving fees payable to his own firm.

Two Messages On Insolvency Practitioner Fee Applications

The court was ultimately satisfied that remuneration on a time-cost basis was appropriate.

The judgment repeatedly stresses that fee estimates are not targets but ceilings, and that where creditor oversight is absent, the court must perform that role with care.

Yet, buried within the judgment are two observations that may prove valuable to practitioners.

First, although the court accepted that there was little point in commencing a creditor decision process that was effectively paralysed by the conflict, the judge observed:

“I would add only that the more orthodox course, and the better practice in any future case of this kind, would have been to canvass the four minority creditors or to seek directions from the court at the outset rather than to proceed directly to a substantive application.”

That is a practical lesson worth underlining.

The second warning is even more pointed.

The application was issued within the 18-month time limit under Rule 18.23, but only by the narrowest of margins. The judge noted that had it arrived even a day later, the applicants could have faced serious jurisdictional difficulties. His advice could hardly have been clearer:

“Practitioners who choose the court route because of a conflict identified at the very outset of the appointment should not leave the application to the eve of the deadline.”

That sentence deserves to find its way into every insolvency practitioner’s mental procedural checklist.

The broader significance of the judgment is reassuring. It demonstrates that the insolvency regime already contains mechanisms to deal with genuine conflicts of interest. What it does not tolerate is complacency. Where creditors cannot scrutinise remuneration, the court will. Where conflicts exist from the outset, practitioners, it seems, are expected to confront them from the outset. And where statutory time limits apply, leaving matters until the last possible moment is not evidence of efficiency. It is perhaps conceivably evidence of optimism.