Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
Companies, damned companies and statistics—corporate insolvency through the years: have we got it right with the existing regimes?*
Andrew Keay **
Peter Walton †
When companies experience insolvency, they may well enter a formal insolvency regime provided for under statute. This paper examines the statistics that have been gathered in relation to company insolvencies in England and Wales and it focuses on the number of all of the formal corporate insolvency regimes that have been available for insolvent companies since records were first kept in 1960. A way to assess whether a policy approach has been successful is to consider changes in the use of formal regimes over time. The aim of the paper is to analyse the statistics, and then to ascertain what can be learned from the statistics as far as the employment of the regimes is concerned.
I. INTRODUCTION
A cruel fact of commercial life is that some companies will fall into insolvency. Some companies tend to move in and out of insolvency depending on trading conditions; and others, while not regularly becoming insolvent, are able to make their way out of insolvency, perhaps because their financial position is not too serious. However, other companies may need to avail themselves of the various insolvency regimes that are provided by the law, in order to address their position. Over the years the UK legislature has seen fit to provide in statute different kinds of regime in order either to permit an orderly conclusion to the trading of insolvent companies or to facilitate their restructuring so that they may trade on effectively. All of this means that companies and their creditors have several options to consider when companies are in challenging financial situations.
This paper examines the statistics that have been gathered in relation to company insolvencies in England and Wales and it focuses on the number of all of the formal corporate insolvency regimes that have been available for insolvent companies over the years.1 This accords with the assertion that a way to assess whether a policy approach has been successful
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Insolvency Service’s Forward Thinking conference held at the University of Liverpool on 10 November 2023.
** Emeritus Professor of Corporate and Commercial Law, School of Law, University of Leeds and Barrister (unregistered).
† Professor of Insolvency Law, University of olverhampton. ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5970-3585.
1. We have gathered into a single table, insolvency statistics from England and Wales up to the end of 2022 as were available to us as at 1 June 2023. The table is reproduced below in the Appendix. It is the product of information and statistics publicly available. We are most grateful for the assistance of the Insolvency Service in identifying a number of sources of such data.
Companies, Damned Companies and Statistics
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