A speech to a City summit this month credited FCA reforms with 25 new companies on London's Main Market this year. The regulator's own numbers, which stop in March, show more companies leaving than joining.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In short. Jon Relleen, the FCA's director of infrastructure and exchanges, told the Reform of the UK Public and Private Capital Markets Summit on 5 October 2026 that "around 25 companies have joined the Main Market, including 7 IPOs in H1 2026" [1]. The FCA's own published Listings data, last updated on 26 June 2026, covers only January to March 2026 and records six new commercial companies, one of them a genuine IPO, against fifteen that delisted their equity securities that quarter [2]. The same table shows delistings outnumbering new commercial companies on the Main Market in every full year from 2021 to 2025. Two documented mistakes: four stars.
A speech given by a regulator's own director, at a summit about that regulator's own reforms, is the easiest kind of claim to check: the regulator usually publishes the underlying data itself. The Financial Conduct Authority does, for the Main Market, in a dataset built for exactly this purpose [2]. Read against it, the speech's headline figure for 2026 does not appear, and the trend it leaves out has run the other way for five straight years.
A packed scorecard, read out loud
Jon Relleen's speech, delivered at the Reform of the UK Public and Private Capital Markets Summit 2026 and published on the FCA's website the same day, opens with a claim of momentum: "the FCA's wide-ranging reforms over recent years are making UK capital markets more effective, competitive and attractive" [1]. Under the heading "Turning reform into results", it lists "around 30 capital-markets focused workstreams" worth of changes, then gets specific about the flagship one, the 2024 overhaul of the UK listing regime: "we have seen many corporate transactions that have been simplified as a result. And around 25 companies have joined the Main Market, including 7 IPOs in H1 2026" [1]. No source is given for either number.
The figure that is not in the FCA's own data
The FCA publishes its own count of this exact thing. Its "FCA Listings data" page, first published and last updated 26 June 2026, sets out "Table 1: Main developments in UK Main Market from Official List data 2020-2026" [2]. The 2026 row is marked with a footnote: "Data as of March 2026." For that quarter, the table records one UK IPO by a commercial company, six new commercial companies added to the Official List in total, and fifteen issuers delisting their equity securities [2]. The page's own narrative calls the quarter "subdued," citing "global political uncertainty" [2].
Nothing on that page, or anywhere else the FCA has published, gives a figure for January to June 2026. The regulator's newest official measurement of its own flagship reform stops three months before the period the speech describes, and the number the speech uses for that longer period does not match, or extend, anything in the dataset built to track it.
The measure the speech does not mention
Table 1 has a column for the number the speech leaves out: "Number of issuers de-listing their equity securities" [2]. Set against the "Number of new commercial Co to the Official List" column in the same table, the Main Market has lost more companies than it gained every year since the reforms began. In 2021, 61 new commercial companies joined against 64 delistings. In 2022, 50 against 55. In 2023, 19 against 39. In 2024, 15 against 69, the widest gap on record. In 2025, 26 against 50 [2]. The quarter already recorded for 2026 continues the pattern: six against fifteen. The same table's count of total issuers on the Main Market fell every year across the same period, from 1,998 in 2021 to 1,739 by the end of the latest recorded quarter [2]. A speech that spends several hundred words on "turning reform into results" does not mention delistings once.
Credit where due
Not every figure in the speech is unsupported. Relleen credits the FCA's transaction reporting changes with saving firms "£100m per year" [1], a figure that matches the regulator's own press release of 3 August 2026 announcing the finalised rules, which states plainly: "the changes will save firms more than £100m a year" [3]. That claim is sourced, dated and consistent across two FCA documents. It is the kind of figure the Main Market claim in the same speech should have been.
The claims, tested
| The document's own words | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Around 25 companies have joined the Main Market, including 7 IPOs in H1 2026" [1] | The FCA's own most recently published Listings data, last updated 26 June 2026, covers January to March 2026 only and records six new commercial companies and one IPO for that quarter; no figure for January to June 2026 appears anywhere on the FCA's site [2] | An uncited figure for a period the regulator's own dataset does not yet cover |
| The speech frames the 2024 listing reforms as "once-in-a-generation" and reports "turning reform into results" without reference to companies leaving the market [1] | The FCA's own data shows more Main Market companies delisting than joining in every year from 2021 to 2025, and in the one 2026 quarter so far recorded [2] | A result the regulator's own data tracks, and does not show, is left out of the account of results |
Verdict
Four stars, from two documented mistakes. Nothing here says the FCA's reform programme is failing on its own terms, or that the transaction-reporting savings and the bond consolidated tape the speech also claims are wrong; the one figure checked against another FCA document, the £100m transaction reporting saving, holds up exactly. The finding is narrower: a regulator's director told a room of market practitioners a specific, memorable number about the reform he leads, for a period his own regulator has not yet published data for, and left out the one number, tracked in the same dataset, that has run against the reform for five consecutive years. A market practitioner who took the speech at its word, rather than checking the FCA's own listings page, would not know the Main Market has shrunk in every one of them.
Sources
- Reforming UK capital markets to ensure they work well for our economy - FCA, speech by Jon Relleen, 5 October 2026
- FCA Listings data - FCA, first published and last updated 26 June 2026
- FCA finalises rules to cut firms' transaction reporting costs by over £100m a year - FCA press release, 3 August 2026