Around 4,000 financial firms in Britain are at “heightened risk” of collapsing due to fallout from the first wave of the pandemic, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said.

The FCA surveyed 23,000 financial firms to check on their resilience to Covid-19, which last year triggered Britain’s worst economic downturn in 300 years.

“At [the] end of October we [had] identified there are 4,000 financial services firms with low financial resilience and at heightened risk of failure,” said Sheldon Mills, the FCA’s executive director of consumers and competition.