Share investment - need to reduce annual broker fees

For a fee they will be happy to send you a share certificate and then you will be the direct owner of the shares registered on the company share register, rather than the broker owning the shares through their nominee company and giving you an online electronic statement of your holdings. If you held the shares directly you would get cheques in the post for your dividend.

That would cost you £35+ vat on the current ii fee scales.

Alternatively you could transfer the holdings electronically to another broker, though it can take several weeks to process - during which time you won't be able to trade the shares. Then you could ask the new broker to give you a share certificate instead, and the new broker might have keener pricing. For example x-o co.uk used to be £15.

Either way, when you do come to sell the shares, if they're in paper form there will usually be a hefty premium for you to trade using paper shares and a telephone order rather than being able to click a button online to dispose of an electronic holding. Plus, if you've closed down your relationships with brokers, you would need to go through their onboarding / new customer requirements before being able to trade.

So, if the holding is large (say £10k+), then the daily negative price fluctuations while waiting to sign up with a broker and execute the trade of your paper shares, could easily be several hundred pounds (given a trivial 1% daily movement is worth £100).

For those sort of reasons I wouldn't bother moving to paper, but keeping an electronic account open with a broker which has a lower fee structure to hold the shares - and ideally, low account closure fees - could be worth looking at. Such as the aforementioned x-o co.uk, or IWeb / Halifax Sharedealing. Youinvest.co.uk will let you open an account for free and their custody fee is only 0.25% per year, capped at £30. HL mentioned by the above poster is free to hold but they charge £30 to close down your account so if you were going to sell up and withdraw all the proceeds within the next year they may not be best option.

(I am planning for them to, hopefully, recover, and sell all of them then)

Good to be confident . I know it's not the thrust of your question but you did say "any advice"; the obvious point to make is that the company itself does not know your preferred exit point, and many fortunes have been lost by investors putting their head in the sand and saying "I won't sell until I get my money back, or at least the most recent high point that I remember the company reaching before..."