NAHL Group Plc (NAH.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon and welcome to the NAHL Group plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. [Voting]

And I'd now like to hand you 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. And this covers the year to the 31st of December 2024. We released our results last Wednesday, the 7th of May, and we're going to provide you with an overview of those results today. So 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. And it's also available in the Investors section of our website. That's www.nahlgroupplc.co.uk. So I'll start today by talking you through the highlights. And 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 2 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. So if you do want to submit a question, please do so. And we will try to answer as many as we can. So 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. And as a result, group revenues decreased by 8% to just under GBP 39 million, but 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 4 years. And actually that cash generation have 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. And 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. And under the circumstances, I'm very pleased with that result. If I look at the operational highlights for our 2 divisions. Well, in our Consumer Legal Services division, the results -- well, 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's delivering on its goals at its current volumes and investment levels. And this is evidenced through the 3,500 claims which we settled in the year. And that generated over GBP 8.5 million cash from settlements at the firm. That was up 43% from the previous year. And National Accident Helpline or NAH generated almost 20,000 new inquiries in a challenging market environment, and I'll talk more about that later on and the external factors that were behind it. It's 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. And I'm 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're 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'm also really pleased that the investments that we've 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 continued 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 aren't familiar with our business, and provide a brief introduction into who we are. So NAHL is a leader in the U.K. consumer legal services and catastrophic injury markets. We help people who've had an accident or suffered medical negligence that wasn't their fault, to get their lives back on track. And in our 30-plus-year history, we've 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 2 divisions, which we call Consumer Legal Services and Critical Care. In Consumer Legal Services, we're one of the U.K.'s leading providers of personal injury advice, services and support. We've got a strong heritage in this market and we've 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 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 2 to 3 years to progress. The joint venture helps us to balance those 2 extremes. Now also in this division we operate a small but profitable property searches business called Searches UK. So that's 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. And these are the most serious injuries often leading to life-changing disabilities and include acquired brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. And they generally have claim settlements exceeding GBP 0.5 million, 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's growing rapidly. It offers peace of mind for customers who directly employ nurses and carers generally after their claim has settled. So those are our 2 trading divisions. We also have a centralized shared services division which provides strategic leadership and support with funding and governance. And over the years, we've 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're proud to have been recognized externally for this culture. We've been awarded the gold standard by investors and people and included in the best small companies list in recent years. So hopefully, you should now have a good overview of who we are and the progress that we've made in 2024. I'll now hand over to Chris, who's going to take you through a review of the financial results.

Thanks, James. I'll start with the P&L. So we generated revenue of GBP 38.8 million. This 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 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 noncontrolling interest 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, were slightly higher than last year. The intangibles which have been amortizing at around GBP 800,000 per 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 noncash impairment charge on the goodwill within the Personal Injury business. We've worked with our auditors in assessing the carrying value, as we do each year, looking at a number of scenarios, with volatility we experienced in the Personal Injury business during 2024, so we decided to take a prudent approach and write off the full goodwill carrying value for the Personal Injury business. This resulted in a noncash charge of GBP 39.9 million and resulted in a statutory loss of GBP 36.5 million. Payments to noncontrolling 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 great percentage of our inquiries have been placed with our own law firm where we retain all of the profit. Finally: Interest costs, they continued 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 pretax level, underlying operating profit before tax rose 113% to GBP 1.4 million. Moving on to cash. So we had another good year on cash, with free cash flow 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 [ about ] 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, which was partly offset by GBP 3 million of investment into new cases into NAL. And again, that was in line with the investment that 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. So it's GBP 400 -- 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've again extended our revolving credit facility with Virgin Money through to the end of 2026. And to save costs, we further reduced the size of that facility by GBP 4 million to GBP 11 million. And I'll pass back to James, who will give some further detail on the 2 divisions.

That's great. Thank you, Chris. So if we start with our Consumer Legal Services division. So our strategy in this division is to create a more profitable and sustainable Personal Injury business. And I think that's pretty clear and have 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're making good progress with that. By developing best-in-class processes and workflows and using technology approach -- appropriately, we can generate operational leverage and provide a great service to our customers, so that's really the focus of our strategy. Now in terms of what happened in 2024. Well, revenues fell. And that was due to the 70% reduction in inquiries placed into our panel of third-party law firms. So 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. And I'll 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. And 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're experiencing, it would now take us longer to grow the level of inquiry volumes. And consequently, we began implementing a series of cost-saving measures to rightsize the NAH part of the business. By the end of the year, we'd captured GBP 1.2 million of annualized savings. And we're working to identify more in 2025. So if we dig into a bit more detail now and start with the National Accident Helpline part of the business. So if we step back and look at the markets: The number of claims registered in the market fell further this year, with RTA, road traffic accident 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. So anyone who's done a search on their phone, they'll notice -- in Google. They will notice, at the top of the page, often there's a box there which says "AI Overviews." And that's where Google sort of scrapes answers off various pages and tries to condense those for you. Now that had a significant impact on the organic search results for firms across the sector and, in fact, across all sectors. And there's lots of information about that online. NAH actually fared relatively well through these changes. We knew they were coming. We've 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. Now what this led to was a really, really competitive paid search environment, more competitive than we've ever seen; and we've been doing this for a long time. And allied 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. Now as soon as we identified this trend, we started implementing what was to become a multifaceted response. And I'll touch on 4 areas of that response. So firstly, we invested in our internal marketing team. We recruited a senior paid search manager. He started in July 2024. And later, an interim marketing director, who started in January of this year. Now these individuals, they're 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're working now to broaden our channel mix so that we're less reliant on Google search. Thirdly, we've restructured our paid search account. We've made improvements to our website. We've rewritten a lot of the content on there and we've developed new lead sources. And then finally, we're leveraging our data. And we're doing a lot of work to understand the leads and the search terms that convert better and generate more revenue for us. And we're using this insight to optimize our bidding strategies on Google. Now clearly there's no silver bullet. And I'm just giving you a flavor of some of the things we're doing there, but the changes we've made do appear to be having a positive effect. And 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. And I'm 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. Now at the same time as dealing with this marketing challenge, the group experienced a further reduction in demand for work from its panel of third-party law firms. And 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. Now whilst we're speaking to a number of firms who are interested in joining our panel and doing some small-scale trials at the moment, we don't really see that trend reversing materially. And that's exactly why we created NAL back in 2019, so that we could process those claims ourselves. And by processing them in NAL, we can generate a higher return per inquiry than either the panel or our joint venture. And the good news is that NAL has grown and has matured over the past couple of years and we're seeing higher average settlements per case than ever before. And there's lots of reasons behind that. And I'll now hand on to Chris, who's going to talk about some of those in more detail.

Thanks, James. So in the next couple of slides, I'll cover off an update on performance in the book of work within NAL. And some of you may already be familiar with these charts. And for those seeing them for the first time, I'll just explain what's going on. When we measure performance in the law firm, we group the cases into cohorts of claims. And that cohort is determined by the year that the claim was started. Charts on the screen shows what's 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. And 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've collected on those cases as they've settled. In addition to the cash that we've collected, we reassess the expected outturn from cohorts twice a year as part of our budgeting and forecasting processes. And whilst we always try to take a prudent approach to forecasting the settlements, this particular cohort was performing really well. And it already had a GBP 0.8 million uplift in previous -- in a 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 outturn 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 settled. 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. Now this is the first time that cash collected had exceeded the value of new inquiries added. Ordinarily, we -- once -- 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 [ where we placed ] in the year. Now to combat that [indiscernible] partly offsetting that -- I mentioned revaluations on the previous chart. We've applied a GBP 2.8 million positive revaluation to our estimates this year. And there are 3 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. And 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, so 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. And then the final part of the revaluation is -- relates to guideline damages rates issued by the judicial college: So updated rates were issued in March 2024. And this included a multiyear inflationary [ increased ], a further uplift in 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've, 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 these claims have already been expensed in prior periods. There are still some processing costs to come through as -- to bring these claims to settlement. The law firm had a really strong year, from submission rates of new claims through to improved litigation. And with the increases that we're seeing to the underlying damages levels, we're more confident than ever about the returns that we're making from these inquiries as we process them through NAL. And I'll pass back to James to cover on Critical Care.

Yes. Thanks, Chris. So as you can see, NAL is now a proven success. And it's 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. So throughout the year, we've been developing the processes to create further efficiencies in both NAL and NAH. We've delivered improvements in processing performance and productivity. We've delivered marketing efficiencies and improved customer service. And you can see on this page some examples of those that I'll touch on. So we've improved submission processes. That's 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're really serious injuries, so very pleased with how that's gone. We've developed our litigation tactics and processes. That's resulted in a 34% increase in proceedings issued. In those claims, we're 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're using AI tools. We -- there's a tool we've 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've 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 where 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. So all of these initiatives should ultimately result in higher win rates and more cash from settlements or lower costs. And that all increases our return on investment. Furthermore. So 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. So lots and lots going on in the Personal Injury business. So if we turn our attention to our other operating division then, Critical Care. Well, 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. And 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. Now Bush & Co., as I mentioned earlier on, operates in the catastrophic injury and care markets, where claims are typically valued over GBP 0.5 million. And the management team estimate that over 80% of case management revenue is linked to RTA inquiry (sic) [ injury ] claims market; and the 24,000 to 30,000 or so accident victims who are, sadly, killed or seriously injured each year. Now 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 [ its ] pre-pandemic data. And 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. And 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. And 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. And this is important because, no matter how many new instructions our business development teams generate, we need the capacity to do that work. And the good news is that we're seeing strong results from our investments in recruitment. We've had 75 new associates recruited in 2024 to support further growth. And we're 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're doing that, including using technology to create portals for our customers to use and to bundle information for our associates, also how we're building a team of employed case managers to increase utilization rates. That should help us to access higher profit margins as well. And for -- those of you who follow the business will know that we've increased our operating profit margin from about 26% in 2022 to over 30% today. Now 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. I think it's worth just pausing here for a second because I know that there will be questions about this process. I've been advised that there's 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's frustrating that it's taking so long to conclude a deal. I will 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. And ordinarily, I think it would be very unusual to announce a process so early on. And that's really made it feel like a long process. It's 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. And what I can't 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 1/3 of revenues. So it just shows how much it's grown. And it's great that we've gotten to such a good balance of services across Bush & Co. So 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. And the number of instructions for new reports also increased by 18%, and that demonstrates a really strong pipeline of work that we've 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 remained strong, so we expect to see further growth in this service line. And we continued to recruit new experts, as I mentioned earlier on, to meet that growth. If I 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. Now this generates recurring revenue for the group through our claimant, defendant and insurer relationships. And these services are billed on a regular basis depending on the level of support that's needed at any point in time. As in expert witness, the customer advocacy scores are really first class, with 96% of customers saying they would instruct us again and 94% overall satisfaction. And that contributed to us securing 460 new instructions in the year. Now whilst that's lower than last year, I'd consider this to be a more normalized level of instructions after the outstanding results we had in 2022 and 2023. We also continued 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. And 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. And this is only -- 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's 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 inquiry acquisition costs; and delivered efficient profitable growth through our mature law firm, NAL. And building on this momentum, I'm 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 the lower volume of new inquiries. And that really just reflects the market dynamics that we're operating in at the moment. But in the first quarter, really pleased to report that we've made further progress in reducing personal injury acquisition costs. And we expect this now to be a normalized level through quarter 2. As I mentioned earlier, this week, we've relaunched our Underdog brand. And 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've talked about before. We'll update on progress on this probably in our interim results later in the year, but we're excited to see where that goes. In NAL. Well, 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 last -- the first quarter of last year that was 26%. And 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 uplift on small claims hybrid cases that Chris talked about earlier on. In Bush & Co. Well, that business experienced slightly lower growth in quarter 1, but the trends within the business persist. So 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. And 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 1 was 9% lower than the prior year, but it was actually 7% more than the preceding quarter. So we're seeing some improvement there, but more work ongoing. Pleasingly, the 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. So that brings the formal presentation to an end. I'd like to thank you all for joining Chris and I today for NAHL's final results. I can see we've got a number of questions come in. We've got plenty of time to take questions, but for the moment, I'm going to hand you back to Lily.

James, Chris, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd 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 via your investor dashboard. James, Chris, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. [ I think I'll ] hand back to you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so. And I'll pick up from you at the end.