Transcript

Oct 12, 2026

Summary

FY2024 revenue fell 8%, but underlying PBT more than doubled and free cash flow cut net debt 27%. Critical Care grew, while 2025 priorities include lower acquisition costs, NAL growth and progress on a potential Bush & Co sale.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the NAHL Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to James Saralis, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Thank you, Lily, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm James Saralis. I'm the CEO of NAHL Group, and I'd like to welcome you all to NAHL's final results presentation. This covers the year to December 31, 2024. We released our results last Wednesday, May 7, and we're going to provide you with an overview of those results today. With me here today is Chris Higham, our Group CFO, and we're going to work through the presentation, which should be on your screen now. It's also available in the investor section of our website, that's www.nahlgroupplc.co.uk. I'll start today by talking you through the highlights. For those of you who are new to the business, I'll give you a short introduction into who we are and what we do. I'll then hand over to Chris to present more detail on our financial performance and continued strong cash generation. We'll then dive into a review of each of the two trading divisions, and we'll finish with an outlook. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end, and we've already had some questions submitted early. If you do want to submit a question, please do so, and we'll try to answer as many as we can. Without further ado, let's get into the highlights from last year. As we previously updated, 2024 saw a challenging trading environment in the group's personal injury business. That sits within our Consumer Legal Services division. As a result, group revenues decreased by 8% to just under GBP 39 million. Despite this, we delivered underlying operating profit for the year in line with market expectations and a 113% increase in underlying PBT to GBP 1.4 million. We continued our strong cash generation, which has been a feature of the group over the past four years. Actually, that cash generation has been enhanced recently by the maturity of our integrated law firm, National Accident Law, or NAL, as I'll refer to it from now on. In total, we generated GBP 2.6 million of free cash flow in the year, and that enabled us to reduce net debt by 27% to GBP 7.1 million by the end of the year. Under the circumstances, I'm very pleased with that result. If I look at the operational highlights for our two divisions, well, in our consumer legal services division, the results, while in line with our long-term strategy, we can now say with confidence, I think, that we have grown NAL to be a mature, efficient law firm that is delivering on its goals at its current volumes and investment levels. This is evidenced through the 3,500 claims which we settled in the year, and that generated over GBP 8.5 million of cash from settlements to the firm. That was up 43% from the previous year. National Accident Helpline, or NAH, generated almost 20,000 new inquiries in a challenging market environment. I will talk more about that later on and the external factors that were behind it. It is worth mentioning the progress that the business has made in reducing inquiry acquisition costs by the end of the year. That was down 30% from its peak as we started to see the benefits of some of the marketing initiatives that we implemented earlier in the year. I am pleased to share that we have relaunched our much-loved Underdog brand just this week. This is a really exciting milestone for the group and one which we are optimistic will help us to unlock a much greater demand through our digital channels. If I turn to our critical care division then, Bush & Co had another strong year, growing revenues by 9% and operating profits saw double-digit growth. Our expert witness services had a great year, increasing revenues by 19%, and our award-winning care proposition grew by 37%. Its second consecutive year of over 35% growth. I am also really pleased that the investments that we have made over the past couple of years in associate recruitment are paying off, and this is really helping us to drive further growth in the business. Finally, throughout the year, the board remained focused on exploring options to accelerate growth in value for shareholders, and we continue to actively progress the potential sale of Bush & Co. So those are the highlights from 2024. Before I expand on them in more detail, this is the point where I usually take a step back, for those of you who are not familiar with our business, and provide a brief introduction into who we are. So NAL is a leader in the U.K. consumer legal services and catastrophic injury markets. We help people who have had an accident or suffered medical negligence that was not their fault to get their lives back on track. In our 30-plus year history, we have helped over 1 million customers access over GBP 1 billion in compensation by providing legal support and rehabilitation services. We provide services and products to individuals and businesses through our two divisions, which we call consumer legal services and critical care. In consumer legal services, we are one of the U.K.'s leading providers of personal injury advice, services, and support. We have got a strong heritage in this market, and we have helped more people injured in accidents in the U.K. than anyone else. Through our market leading brand, National Accident Helpline, we guide accident victims through the steps of making a personal injury claim. We triage those claims, and for those that we think have legal merit, we either process those claims ourselves in our own fully integrated law firm, National Accident Law, or we pass them to one of our panel of specialist third-party law firms, or we pass them to our joint venture for processing. Distributing claims to our panel provides us access to quick profit and cash, with firms typically paying in 30 days. However, if we process those claims ourselves in National Accident Law, then we achieve higher levels of profit, but with a longer working capital cycle as the claims take on average two to three years to progress. The joint venture helps us to balance those two extremes. Also in this division, we operate a small but profitable property searches business called Searches UK. That is consumer legal services. In our Critical Care division, the Bush & Co. business is a market leader in expert witness reports, immediate needs assessments, and case management rehabilitation services in the U.K. We support children, young people and adults following a catastrophic injury or clinical negligence. These are the most serious injuries, often leading to life-changing disabilities, and include acquired brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. They generally have claim settlements exceeding half a million pounds, but usually the claims we deal with are into the millions. We also have an award-winning care proposition, which we launched in 2021, and it is growing rapidly. It offers peace of mind for customers who directly employ nurses and carers, generally after their claim has settled. Those are our two trading divisions. We also have a centralized shared services division, which provides strategic leadership and support with funding and governance. Over the years, we have built an inclusive and supportive employee culture with a strong focus on employee engagement, and that helps us to recruit and retain top talent from across the U.K. We are proud we have been recognized externally for this culture. We have been awarded the gold standard by Investors in People and included in the best small companies list in recent years. Hopefully you should now have a good overview of who we are and the progress that we have made in 2024. I will now hand over to Chris, who is going to take you through a review of the financial results. Thanks, James. I will start with P&L. We generated revenue of GBP 38.8 million, which was 8% lower than last year and primarily relates to the personal injury business, where lower inquiry volumes and a softer panel demand due to continued market consolidation resulted in revenues 21% lower than last year. This was partially offset by a 29% growth in revenue from the Searches UK business, taking the overall position for Consumer Legal Services to GBP 22.9 million, 17% lower than last year. The Critical Care business had another good year, growing revenue by 9%. This was largely driven by the expert witness service. Underlying operating profit was GBP 3.9 million. That was marginally behind last year. Critical Care grew profits by GBP 0.4 million or 10%, with Consumer Legal Services down by GBP 0.8 million to GBP 2 million. There was, however, a reduction in non-controlling interests, which largely offsets this. In the shared services part of the business, we reduced costs by 14% to GBP 1.7 million, and other items, which include share-based payments and amortization of intangibles, was slightly higher than last year. The intangibles, which have been amortizing at around GBP 800,000 a year, have now been fully amortized. We incurred GBP 0.6 million of exceptional costs in the year. Around GBP 0.4 million of this related to the potential disposal of Bush & Co. with a further GBP 0.2 million related to the associated restructuring costs in the personal injury business. We also recognized a non-cash impairment charge on the goodwill within the personal injury business. We worked with our auditors in assessing the carrying value as we do each year, looking at a number of scenarios. With the volatility we experienced in the personal injury business during 2024, we decided to take a prudent approach and write off the full goodwill carrying value for the personal injury business. This resulted in a non-cash charge of GBP 39.9 million, resulting in a statutory loss of GBP 36.5 million. Payments to non-controlling interests, which relate to our joint ventures, fell by GBP 0.7 million to GBP 1.9 million in the year, and this reflects the change in placement that we've seen in recent years, where a greater percentage of our inquiries have been placed with our own law firms where we retain all of the profit. Finally, interest costs, they continue to fall. They dropped by 26% to GBP 0.7 million, and that's primarily as a result of the continued reduction in net debt. At a pre-tax level, underlying operating profit before tax rose 113% to GBP 1.4 million. Moving on to cash. We had another good year on cash, with free cash flow of GBP 2.6 million. That exceeded the market forecasts and further reduced our net debt. Operating cash conversion was again strong at 173%, and both divisions played a part in contributing towards that result. Our Consumer Legal Services division generated GBP 3.1 million of operating profit, and that included GBP 0.4 million from the residential property business. The personal injury business generated GBP 2.7 million of operating cash, driven by continued growth in settlements, which increased from GBP 6 million to GBP 8.5 million in the year. This was partly offset by GBP 3 million of investment into new cases into NAL, and again, that was in line with the investment we put in 2023. We paid GBP 2.1 million in drawings to LLP members, which meant that the personal injury business was again cash generative, generating GBP 0.7 million of cash contribution in the year. Critical Care business again performed well from a cash perspective, generating GBP 5.4 million of operating cash in the year. That's 11% more than last year with an operating cash conversion of 112%. Interest payments, they came down as the debt came down. It's GBP 400,000 lower than last year. And resulting in GBP 2.6 million of free cash flow translating into a net debt reduction of 27%, from GBP 9.7 million down to GBP 7.1 million by the end of the year. Finally, since the end of the year, we have again extended our revolving credit facility with Virgin Money through to the end of 2026. To save costs, we have further reduced the size of that facility by GBP 4 million to GBP 11 million. I will pass back to James who will give some further detail on the two divisions. That is great. Thank you, Chris. If we start with our Consumer Legal Services division. Our strategy in this division is to create a more profitable and sustainable personal injury business. I think that is pretty clear and been consistent over the last few years. We aim to grow the number of accident victims that we support by growing the number of inquiries that we generate through our marketing. We then want to grow the value of inquiries that we process ourselves in NAL, where we can generate more profit per inquiry, and we are making good progress with that. By developing best-in-class processes and workflows and using technology appropriately, we can generate operational leverage and provide a great service to our customers. That is really the focus of our strategy. In terms of what happened in 2024, where revenues fell, and that was due to the 70% reduction in inquiries placed into our panel of third-party law firms. These firms generate short-term revenue and profit for us, whereas growing NAL generates higher revenues and profit, but with a longer working capital cycle. I will expand a little bit more on that in the next few slides. Underlying operating profit for the division was also lower this year, due to both the lack of panel demand, but also an unusually high acquisition cost for new inquiries. As I mentioned earlier, NAL is now a mature law firm, and we made good progress this year growing processing revenues by 20% and upgrading the value of the book, which Chris will talk about later. This has helped our PI business to remain cash generative in the year and for the past few years, actually. Finally, in 2024, the board concluded that because of the market environment that we are experiencing, it would now take us longer to grow the level of inquiry volumes. Consequently, we began implementing a series of cost saving measures to right size the NAH part of the business. By the end of the year, we had captured GBP 1.2 million of annualized savings, and we are working to identify more in 2025. If we dig into a bit more detail now and start with the National Accident Helpline part of the business. If we step back and look at the market, the number of claims registered in the market fell further this year with RTA, road traffic accidents, or RTA, which is the majority of the market, down 5%. This was all compounded with a series of major changes to Google Search algorithms, predominantly related to the launch of AI Overviews. Anyone who has done a search on their phone, they will notice in Google, at the top of the page often there is a box there which says AI Overviews. That is where Google scrapes answers off various pages and tries to condense those for you. That had a significant impact on the organic search results for firms across the sector and in fact, across all sectors, and there is lots of information about that online. NAH actually fared relatively well through these changes. We knew they were coming, we had been preparing for them, and we held our search ranking positions. However, several of our competitors fared less well, and their response to that was to aggressively invest in paid search in order to push themselves further up the page. What this led to was a really competitive paid search environment, more competitive than we have ever seen, and we have been doing this for a long time. A ally to that, of course, we also work with a number of lead provider partners. They experienced increased acquisition costs as well, and all of that made lead acquisition disproportionately expensive. As a result, in our business, NAH acquired fewer leads in the year and experienced significantly elevated inquiry acquisition costs. As soon as we identified this trend, we started implementing what was to become a multifaceted response, and I will touch on four areas of that response. Firstly, we invested in our internal marketing team. We recruited a senior paid search manager who started in July 2024, and later an interim marketing director who started in January of this year. These individuals, they are already having a really positive impact on our lead generation. Secondly, we changed the marketing agency that supports our internal team with paid advertising. We invested in conversion rate optimization, and we are working now to broaden our channel mix so that we are less reliant on Google Search. Thirdly, we have restructured our paid search account. We have made improvements to our website. We have rewritten a lot of the content on there, and we have developed new lead sources. Finally, we are leveraging our data. We are doing a lot of work to understand the leads and the search terms that convert better and generate more revenue for us. We are using this insight to optimize our bidding strategy for Google. Clearly, there is no silver bullet. Just giving you a flavor of some of the things we are doing there. But the changes we have made do appear to be having a positive effect. By the end of the year, the average cost of acquisition of new inquiries fell by around 30% compared to the peak in September 2024. I am pleased to report that 2025 has also started well with costs falling further, and we expect this level to be maintained in quarter 2 2025 as well. At the same time, when dealing with these marketing challenge, the group experienced a further reduction in demand for work from its panel of third-party law firms. This is the continuation of a trend that we anticipated several years ago due to lower claim numbers in the market, caused really by the government's whiplash reforms, which were implemented in 2021, and also subsequently exacerbated by market consolidation. Whilst we are speaking to a number of firms who are interested in joining our panel and doing some small-scale trials at the moment, we do not really see that trend reversing materially. That is exactly why we created NAL back in 2019, so that we could process those claims ourselves. By processing them in NAL, we can generate the higher return per inquiry than either the panel or our joint venture. The good news is that NAL has grown and has matured over the past couple of years, and we are seeing higher average settlements per case than ever before. There are lots of reasons behind that. I will now hand on to Chris, who is going to talk about some of those in more detail. Thanks, James. The next couple of slides I will cover off an update in performance in the book of work within NAL. Some of you may already be familiar with these charts. For those seeing them for the first time, I will just explain what is going on. When we measure performance in the law firm, we group the cases into a cohort of claims, and that cohort is determined by the year that the claim was started. The charts on the screen shows what has happened to the 2019 cohort of cases, which is now almost fully complete. In that cohort, we placed 2,415 inquiries into NAL and initially expected those inquiries to generate future revenue and cash of GBP 2.3 million once they settled. You can see that from the far left-hand bar on the chart. Personal injury claims, they can take a number of years to reach conclusion, and you can see that life cycle playing out by the gray bars, which reflects the cash that we collected on those cases as they settled. In addition to the cash that we collected, we reassess the expected outcome from cohorts twice a year as part of our budgeting and forecasting processes. Whilst we always try to take a prudent approach to forecasting the settlements, this particular cohort was performing really well and had already had a GBP 0.8 million uplift in the previous reporting period. Since then, the cohort has continued to perform well and a further GBP 0.2 million uplift has been applied during this year, taking the overall revaluation to GBP 1 million and the overall expected outcome for this cohort to GBP 3.3 million. So far, we've settled 1,217 claims, and that's generated GBP 3.2 million of cash. We still have 150 cases still live on this cohort, which give us confidence that we'll meet the revised target of GBP 3.3 million. The other cohorts continue to perform well, and we've also seen uplifts to their valuation. I won't cover them now, but we've included them in the appendices at the back of the pack. This chart tracks the year-on-year value of the book, with the value of new cases in a year plotted alongside the cash that we generated in a particular year as those cases settle. The expected value of the cases is represented by the pink bars each year and the cash collected by the gray bars. We placed 5,892 inquiries into NAL during 2024. We expect those cases to generate GBP 6.2 million in future revenue and cash once they settle. You can see that with the pink bar inside the dotted box towards the right-hand side of the chart. Also within that box is the GBP 8.5 million cash collected from settled claims in 2024. This is the first time that cash collected had exceeded the value of new inquiries added. Ordinarily, now the law firm has reached maturity, we'd expect cash collected to broadly match the value of new inquiries added in the year. The lower volumes that we generated in 2024, and therefore the lower volumes placed into NAL, meant that cases settled at a higher rate than were replaced in the year. To combat that, partially I was saying there, I mentioned revaluations on the previous chart. We've applied a GBP 2.8 million positive revaluation to our estimates this year, and there's three key reasons behind that. First relates to improvements we've made in our litigation processes in recent years, and that's delivering better results for our customers as well as boosting our revenues, and that's expected to continue. Alongside this, a long-awaited ruling from the Supreme Court relating to small claims cases with more than one injury, provided clarity that injuries should be valued separately. That, again, has led to higher damages and therefore higher revenues. Despite this ruling, the settlement offers from insurers, disappointingly on these cases, continue to undervalue the claims. To address this, we are having to litigate a number of these claims to achieve the uplift. The courts are ruling in our favor, and the higher values are being achieved, but it is taking longer than we had originally expected. The final part of the revaluation is related to guideline damages rates issued by the Judicial College. The updated rates were issued in March 2024, and this included a multi-year inflationary increase, further uplifting the damages levels and will benefit most open cases as they settle. So what that means in terms of the overall picture is that the value of all of our cohorts grew by GBP 9 million in the year to GBP 35.9 million. This is the sum of all the figures in the bar on the far right-hand side of the chart. We so far collected GBP 21.5 million in cash from 11,331 settled claims, and we had 8,473 ongoing claims at the year-end. These claims are expected to generate future cash receipts of GBP 14.4 million, future revenue of GBP 10.5 million, and future gross profit of GBP 8.5 million. The marketing costs of generating new claims have already been expensed in prior periods. There is still some processing costs to come through as we to bring new claims to settlement. The law firm had a really strong year from submission rates on new claims through to improved litigation. With the increases that we are seeing to the underlying damages levels, we are more confident than ever about the returns that we are making from these inquiries as we process them through NAL. I will pass back to James to cover on critical care. Yeah, thanks, Chris. NAL is now a proven success, and it has shown that it delivers the best return from inquiries invested in it. Before we touch on critical care, I just wanted to go through this slide. Throughout the year, we have been developing the processes to create further efficiencies in both NAL and NAH. We have delivered improvements in processing performance and productivity. We have delivered marketing efficiencies and improved customer service. You can see on this page some examples of those that I will touch on. We have improved submission processes. That has resulted in a 31% improvement in sign-up rates for non-RTA claims and importantly, a 51% increase for higher value claims. Those higher value claims can have a big impact on our results because they are really serious injuries. Very pleased with how that has gone. We have developed our litigation tactics and processes. That has resulted in a 34% increase in proceedings issued. In those claims, we are settling claims further along in the legal process, and that allows us to access higher revenues for ourselves and greater compensation for our customers as well, which is a great outcome. We implemented new incentive schemes for fee earners, and that helps us to accelerate case progression. We insourced more marketing processes to increase the control we have over paid search activity and to reduce agency costs. We are using AI tools. There is a tool we started using this year to block fraudulent clicks and IP addresses and bot traffic. That helps us to reduce inefficient paid search costs. We think actually that alone is going to help us save over GBP 100,000 of marketing costs this year. We have created a new client support team to improve responsiveness to customer queries. Just to give you an idea on that one, the expressions of dissatisfaction from our customers, whether they've got an issue that they've raised with us, they reduced by 50% in the year, partly in response to this team and various other initiatives we've put in place. All of these initiatives should ultimately result in higher win rates and more cash from settlements or lower costs, and that will increase our return on investment. Furthermore, in light of the challenging market conditions which resulted in NAH operating at a lower level of inquiries, we've implemented certain cost saving measures in the year, and that's included a restructuring of the personal injury management team. This has resulted in GBP 1.2 million of annualized cost savings, of which GBP 0.3 million benefited 2024. That was net of GBP 0.1 million of implementation costs, which are presented in our exceptional costs. These savings are primarily in the NAH business. We continue to explore further cost saving opportunities and hopefully that will lead to more operating efficiencies in 2025. Lots and lots going on in the personal injury business. If we turn our attention to our other operating division, then Critical Care. Bush & Co had another really strong year growing revenues and profits. Revenues were up 9% to just under GBP 16 million, and operating profit was up 10% to GBP 4.9 million. We increased our operating profit margin as well to 30.6%. The business generated GBP 5.4 million of cash, which was 10% more than the prior year. Bush & Co, as I mentioned earlier on, operates in the catastrophic injury and care markets, where claims are typically valued over half a million pounds. The management team estimate that over 80% of case management revenue is linked to RTA injury claims market and the 24,000 to 30,000 or so accident victims who are sadly killed or seriously injured each year. The difference in this business is that while RTA claims have fallen by almost half since 2019, the number of killed and seriously injured victims has been growing back in line with this pre-pandemic data. Our strategy is to grow share in this market by appealing to a broader customer base, by extending our competencies and specialisms, and to be more efficient at what we do. What that means in practice is that we will continue to invest in business development activities to ensure that we build really deep relationships with the top law firms operating in our sector. We've been extremely successful at that. For example, if you consider the Legal 500, there are 38 tier 1 firms ranked for claimant PI and clinical negligence in the U.K., and Bush & Co work with 37 of them. It also means that we will look to grow our pool of associates, focusing on key specialisms where we've identified demand. This is important because no matter how many new instructions our business development teams generate, we need the capacity to do that work. The good news is that we're seeing strong results from our investments in recruitment. We had 75 new associates recruited in 2024 to support further growth, and we are now working with almost 200 expert witness associates and over 130 case managers. Finally, we want to be more efficient at what we do, and there are several examples of how we are doing that, including using technology to create portals for our customers to use and to bundle information for our associates. Or also how we are building a team of employed case managers to increase utilization rates. That should help us to access higher profit margins as well. For those of you who follow the business will know that we have increased our operating profit margin from about 26% in 2022 to over 30% today. Now, throughout the year, the board remains focused on exploring options to accelerate growth in value for shareholders, and we continue to actively progress the potential sale of Bush & Co. I think it is worth just pausing here for a second because I know that there will be questions about this process. I have been advised there is actually very little I can say, any more I can say about it at this stage. But we remain in productive conversations with a potential buyer regarding the sale of the business. I accept it is frustrating that it has taken so long to conclude a deal. I would say that it was unfortunate that we were forced to make the first announcement about that a year ago. We had to respond to market speculation. Ordinarily, I think it would be very unusual to announce a process so early on. That is really made it feel like quite a long process. It is also a difficult environment to do deals in at the moment. But I can tell you that we are working extremely hard to progress this opportunity and to get the best outcome for shareholders. So nothing can be guaranteed, but I feel optimistic that we can get this over the line. What I cannot do really is to give you any indication on timing at the moment. Now, growth in Bush & Co was primarily driven by our expert witness services business, and this now accounts for 49% of Bush & Co revenues. Just a few years ago, I remember expert witness was around a third of revenue, so it just shows how much it has grown, and it is great that we have gotten to such a good balance of services across Bush & Co. Expert witness services had another really strong year, growing revenues by 19% in 2024. The team delivered 1,335 reports to customers, an increase of 18% on the prior year. The number of instructions for new reports also increased by 18%, and that demonstrates a really strong pipeline of work that we have got for the future. Our customer advocacy scores are extremely high. So of the customers who have instructed us, 96% of them would instruct us again, and we had a 98% overall satisfaction. So really fantastic scores. So well done to the team for those. Demand for our services remains strong, so we expect to see further growth in this service line, and we continue to recruit new experts, as I mentioned earlier on, to meet that growth. Let us turn to case management services then. Well, revenues were broadly in line with last year and the business delivered 490 initial needs assessment reports or INAs, which was 9% lower than the previous year. Importantly, Bush & Co. is still servicing over 1,300 ongoing case management clients. This generates recurring revenue for the group through our claimant, defendant, and insurer relationships. These services are billed on a regular basis, depending on the level of support that is needed at any point in time. As an expert witness, the customer advocacy scores are really first class, with 96% of customers saying they would instruct us again and 94% overall satisfaction. That contributed to us securing 460 new instructions in the year. Now whilst that is lower than last year, I would consider this to be a more normalized level of instructions after the outstanding results we had in 2022 and 2023. We also continue to grow our team of employed case managers, as I mentioned earlier on. This enables us to process less complex work at a higher utilization rate, and that helps us to increase our margins. So the team increased from 9 employees at the start of the year to 11 by the end of 2024. Finally, in critical care, our Bush & Co Care Solutions service is now well-established and had another strong year. So this service line complements our case management proposition and allows us to expand into the adjacent care market. Revenues increased by 37% to GBP 0.7 million, all of which is recurring revenue. This is the second consecutive year now of over 35% growth. The team are building a great reputation in the marketplace, and I was really pleased that they were recognized for their work by their peers by winning the Supporting the Industry Award at the 2024 PI Awards. So that is a quick overview of the results for 2024. If we turn now to the outlook. Well, as you saw earlier, the group finished 2024 really strongly. We reduced the inquiry acquisition cost and delivered efficient, profitable growth through our mature law firm, NAL. Building on this momentum, I am pleased to report that the group has started 2025 well. In consumer legal services, we have reset our expectation for inquiry volumes in 2025 to reflect a lower volume of new inquiries, and that really just reflects the market dynamics that we are operating in at the moment. But in the first quarter, really pleased to report that we have made further progress in reducing personal injury acquisition cost. We expect this now to be a normalized level through quarter 2. As I mentioned earlier, this week we have relaunched our Underdog brand. We believe this can help us to boost inquiry volumes through our digital channels and support our efforts to unlock that latent demand in the marketplace that I have talked about before. We update on progress on this, probably in our interim results later in the year, but we are excited to see where that goes. In NAL continued to perform well in the first quarter of 2025. 37% of the new inquiries that we generated were placed into NAL, compared to the first quarter of last year, that was 26%. 950 existing cases were settled. That was a 10% improvement on the previous quarter. In total, these settlements generated GBP 2.8 million of cash. That was 34% higher than a year ago, and that really demonstrates the maturity of the law firm and the benefit of the inflationary increases in settlement values and the uplifts on small claims hybrid cases that Chris talked about earlier on. In Bush & Co, that business experienced slightly lower growth in quarter one, but the trends within the business persist. Demand for our expert witness proposition remains very strong. The team have delivered 10% growth in the number of reports issued in the first quarter compared to the prior year. And encouragingly, levels of recruitment of new expert witness associates has continued and actually is particularly strong in the first quarter. That should help us to support growth later in the year and unlock that pipeline of new instructions that I talked about. Case management remains a bit more challenging. The number of INAs that we issued in quarter one was 9% lower than the prior year, but it was actually 7% more than the preceding quarter. So we are seeing some improvements there, but more work ongoing. Bush & Co Care proposition continues to grow strongly. The business continues to receive excellent feedback from customers, and total instruction numbers increased from the previous quarter. Finally, the group continued its strong cash collection profile, a real consistent strength over the past few years, and we reduced net debt further to GBP 6 million at the end of March 2025. That was 15% lower than year-end and 38% lower than 12 months prior. That brings the formal presentation to an end. I would like to thank you all for joining Chris and I today for NAHL's final results. I can see we have got a number of questions come in. We have got plenty of time to take questions, but for the moment, I am going to hand you back to Lily. James, Chris, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed by our investor dashboard. James, Chris, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Next, I will hand back to you to read out the questions and give response where appropriate to do so, and I will pick up from you at the end. Yes, thanks, Lily. We have a number of questions in, so thanks very much for those. First question, actually the first 2 questions that we've had were pre-submitted, and they're in connection with the possible sale of Bush & Co. I've talked about that earlier on, and unfortunately, I'm not really able to elaborate on that further at this stage. Just to reiterate, the board are very focused on delivering growth in shareholder value, and we believe a sale might help to accelerate this if we can secure the right deal. We remain in productive conversations with a potential buyer regarding the sale, and I get it's frustrating for our shareholders that it's taken so long to conclude a deal. But we were forced to announce this a year ago, which I think was quite early in the process. It's a difficult environment, but I can tell you we're working really hard to get the best outcome for shareholders, and we feel optimistic that we can get this over the line. So that's the first couple of questions. The next one was, can you expand on the early results seen from the in-house marketing team and new PPC strategies in 2025? Yes. Thanks to John for that question. I think actually that came in possibly just before I talked about what we're doing around that. But there's lots and lots of work going on internally to try and improve our paid search performance. We've been refactoring our PPC campaigns. We've been rewriting a lot of the landing pages for PPC which are live on our website now. There's been a coordinated program of conversion rate optimization as well. I mentioned an AI tool which we're using as well, and there's a number of different AI tools we're using across the business to try and make us more efficient as a business. And we've changed the agency that we're working with. We think the performance of our previous agency had dropped off last year. And so we've now migrated to a new agency, and we have invested quite significantly in improving our existing internal marketing team. I think a combination of those things, we're seeing the results in terms of the cost of acquisition coming down, and that's fantastic to see. What we need to double down on now and continue to focus on is driving volume growth. And one of the initiatives we've launched to try and help with that is the new Underdog character. We've got our new website live, our new Underdog website live, it's underdog.co.uk, and we are investing in PPC through paid search through that brand as well. It'll be interesting to see how that progresses. So thanks for the question. The next question we have in here was about Law Together, which is our joint venture LLP in partnership with HCC Solicitors. The question is, Law Together is growing. Would you consider investing further in JV models if panel demand does not recover? Well, really good question. What I would say to that, and Billy if you want to add anything to this, Chris, as well, but we have invested further in our JV. When we saw the panel demand drop off significantly last year, it took some time to scale up NAL to take some of that work, which we have been doing, and there was an opportunity to place more into the joint venture. We actually increased placement into the joint venture by 55% last year. That business is doing really well. It is great to see that, and we are benefiting from that in the P&L as well. It is great to have the flexibility that the joint venture provides us, and our three channel distribution business model really helps us to manage those, provide more flexibility in distribution. Yeah. I think just to add to that, I think it is a question that I was asked about, would we invest further in other JV models in the future if panels did not recover, if panel demands recover. I think alongside the JVs, the JV is hugely important to us. It is mature now and it is becoming more and more predictable with each month. As well as our underlying law firm, Sophe. NAL has also built that capability in the non-RTA space. That allows us to have that capacity as well to process more of our inquiries as volumes come back. Eventually we want to grow that space in an RTA business in NAL as well. That is only made a special result on our inquiries. Okay, great. Thank you, Chris. The next question is about critical care again. This is if critical care is sold, how do you plan to reallocate the proceeds? Will there be a return of capital to shareholders or reinvestment in the remaining group? I think it is difficult to answer that one precisely. It is a very valid question. I think the options for us there are possibly threefold. I would say we still have some bank debt within the business, and we are incurring interest costs on that. It may be a prudent option to pay that off from the proceeds in the first instance. I think we are very keen to accelerate value to shareholders and some sort of distribution there would seem appropriate. We are also feeling very confident about our personal injury business, National Accident Law, and the processing elements of that is mature, and I think we feel like we have proven the model there, so it would be great to be able to invest in that and grow that business as well. Certainly a combination of those three. How we calibrate that, I think we need to get the sale across the line first and do everything we can to make that happen. Then I think it is a conversation that we can have with our shareholders as to how we calibrate that. Certainly I would not be surprised if all three of those options form part of the answer there. I am sorry, I cannot say more than that now. The next question is about the revolving credit facility. Then Chris, if you want to take this one. The question is, you've reduced the RCF facility progressively to GBP 11 million through 2026. Given the improving cash profile, when do you expect to be net cash positive? Right. Okay. Yeah, we're really pleased with the cash performance over the past couple of years and can really see the benefit now of those placing settlements through NAL now that law firms have become mature. Yeah, so we got the debt by GBP 2.6 million last year. James already outlined in the outlook that we've dropped it by further GBP 1.1 million in the first quarter. If you speak to our analysts, they guide the market that net debt will be down about GBP 3 million by the end of the year. We think that's achievable. That kind of gives some indication, I guess, as to the trajectory we're on with that cash profile still coming through. I guess that's all dependent on Bush & Co being part of the group for the full year instead of the nine months figures that are out there. But yeah, in terms of the underlying business, we think those numbers are achievable. Okay. Thanks, Chris. Next question is from Tim. Thank you, Tim. The question is why did you wait so long to hire in-house search talent when efficient lead gen is such a crucial aspect of your business? Thanks for the question. I think maybe I might have misled you there a little bit, or made it sound like that was the first point at which we'd recruited some internal marketing resource. That's not the case at all. You're absolutely right. Efficient lead generation is where the business started, essentially. We've been doing that for over 30 years. That is our core competency. We've had a really strong marketing team through that period. I think going into 2024, we relied, in part on an agency relationship that actually turned out wasn't doing that well for us. So as I mentioned earlier on, we migrated to a new partner. Notwithstanding that, we still had talent internally to work on paid search. What we wanted to do is to add to that. Earlier in the year, we started looking for an additional paid search manager. Actually, that was a really difficult role to fill, and it did take us a few months to find the right person, just because I think it's a really competitive market out there. As I mentioned earlier on, the changes that Google made to their search algorithms didn't just affect us. They didn't just affect our sector. They affected all sectors out there. Everyone was scrambling for the same talent. We were really fortunate in that we managed to find someone who actually had experience working in our sector and has been fantastic for us. So that's great. It did take a little while, but it wasn't through lack of trying. Hopefully that helps to explain that. The next one, Chris, I don't know if you want to have a stab at this one. It's about NAL and the returns that we're making on claims processed in NAL. Yeah, tricky question probably, but- Yeah, sure. There aren't any numbers we put out publicly around kind of ROI at this stage. I guess what I will say is that confidence levels in NAL have increased year-on-year. Last year were at the highest they've been in terms of the predictability of the kind of the value of the claims that we're processing, the points of settlement, and kind of how long these claims are taking. I think that has improved. I think what made it tricky last year is the lower volumes that went into the law firm. That's where I guess the cost of running the business from a kind of platform level, if you like. That's scalable for us without incurring too much in the way of additional fixed costs. There would be dynamic costs that we'd have to incur in terms of PMs, et cetera, to process the work. As we continue to grow the volumes of inquiry that we process in NAL, that ROI just returns, that ROI improves exponentially really in terms of what we can achieve through processing that work ourselves. We know that we make more through processing new claims ourselves than we do through the JV and through the panel. Strategically, that's where we're heading is processing more claims through our own vehicle. Ideally, we'll be putting in more than we did last year, and we're looking to recap that volume and continue to grow from there. Okay, thanks, Chris. The last question that we have at the moment is from Mike. "What's the strategic reason for selling Bush & Co., which appears to be a high-performing core business?" I would agree with you. Bush & Co. is a high-performing business. The origin of that decision came from lots of feedback that we had from our shareholders and consideration by the board around the valuation that we had that we were running at through our share price. We felt that if you calculated a sum of the parts valuations from reflecting the different parts of our business, we were just undervalued. I think a sale of one or other of our businesses was a good way to force the market to recognize the value of our underlying assets. We believe that to be the case. So that's what we're progressing. We're looking for the best outcome for shareholders, not necessarily the quickest outcome. We're looking for the right deal. If we get this to a position where we've completed the process and we've got an offer on the table, we will put that to shareholders. We'll issue a circular, and shareholders will get a vote on that deal because Bush & Co. is such a meaningful part of the business. Shareholders can decide whether they want to progress with that. So we're working really hard to that. Okay, so that's the end of the questions that we have here. Thank you very much for your engagement in that. Some really, really good questions in there. Just to finish then, I think if I can just sum up, I'd say that 2024 was a challenging year for NAL. We had a difficult marketing environment hampering lead generation for our National Accident Helpline brand, compounding a lack of demand from panel firms in our personal injury business. But despite these challenges, the group delivered growth in underlying profit before tax and another significant reduction in net debt. I'm pleased to report that we finished 2024 strongly, and we've carried that momentum through quarter one for 2025, where we've seen further reduction in inquiry acquisition costs in NAH. We've seen increased cash from settlements in NAL, and we've experienced continued strong demand for our expert witness and care services in Critical Care. This has all helped us to reduce net debt by a further 15% to GBP 6 million at the 31st of March 2025. So finally, this week we've relaunched our much-loved Underdog brand. It's a really exciting milestone for the group and one which we're optimistic will help us to unlock greater demand through our digital channels. So thanks very much for joining Chris and I today, and wish you a good afternoon. James, Chris, thank you for updating investors today. If I could just ask investors not to close the session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can best understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I am sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of NAHL Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.