 The
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has published a green
paper setting out a vision to build an industrial strategy that addresses long-term challenges to
the UK economy. The aim is to improve living standards and economic growth by
increasing productivity and driving growth across the whole country. Responses to
the green paper can be made online or in writing until 17 April 2017.
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Our
insolvency regime is well regarded internationally and enables the assets of
companies that have ceased trading to be realised and returned to creditors
more quickly than in other jurisdictions, including the US, France and Germany.
We are always alert to the possibility of abuse however, and a fundamental part
of our regime is consideration of the conduct of the directors of companies
prior to insolvency, backed by powers to prevent an unfit director from running
a business for up to 15 years. A legislative change in 2015 is enabling us to take action to remove rogue
directors form the market more quickly giving greater protection to potential
investors, competitors and customers. We are now able to use information
provided by other regulators as part of our deliberations, gathering additional
information where needed, rather than having to undertake a fresh
investigations ourselves to gather the same information.
An
example of where cooperation has produced results recently relates to investigative
material gathered by the Home Office Immigration Enforcement (HOIE) team. HOIE
investigates companies who employ illegal workers and can levy fines where this
is found to have occurred. Companies employing illegal workers usually avoid paying PAYE and NIC contributions, gaining an
unfair advantage over their competitors and cheating legitimate jobseekers out
of employment. They often pay lower
wages to the employees concerned and take them out of the protection provided
by UK employment law. Using information provided by HOIE, since April 2016 we have
disqualified 106 directors of companies sanctioned for employing illegal
workers who attempted to use the insolvency regime to shut down their
businesses as a way of escaping the fines levied, often leaving other creditors
out of pocket through the liquidation process as well. Directors disqualified
included a Bristol hotelier who had employed 5 illegal workers and whose business at
liquidation owed creditors £139,622, including a £25,000 HOIE fine; the owner
of an Oldham industrial laundry fined £15,000 for employing 3 illegal workers
which went into liquidation owing £105,367 to creditors and six restaurateurs banned for between six and eight years.
 Credit, debt and insolvency specialist Stephen Allinson has been appointed chairman of the Insolvency Service Board, following the retirement of David Ereira. Mr Allinson is a solicitor and licensed insolvency practitioner with extensive industry experience. He has written and presented widely on all areas of debt recovery and insolvency; is a visiting lecturer at the University of Law and chairs the Joint Insolvency Examination Board as well as being a consultant with Shoosmiths LLP. He first joined the Insolvency Service Board as a non-executive director in 2015.
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Statutory forms for use in insolvency
procedures will be withdrawn from 6 April 2017 when the modernised Insolvency (England & Wales) Rules 2016 come into force. From that date, the new rules prescribe the
content, setting out the information that needs to be contained in documents
relating to insolvency processes, including the required format.
Insolvency practitioners are free to create
their own templates or to use the commercially available templates which have
been designed to comply with these requirements. We will be progressively
transferring the current statutory forms into a downloadable zipfile on our website in the
run up to the new rules being introduced.
Compulsory liquidations and bankruptcies
We will be creating a small set of templates
that practitioners can use from 6 April 2017. These relate only to compulsory
liquidations and bankruptcies and are designed specifically to assist the
Official Receiver and our users. . These will available on our website after 6
April. If practitioners choose not to use these forms, the new rules specify
what information is required and the form in which it is to be supplied.
Please contact us if you have any further questions.
 Gazette notices
The Gazette has also updated its services to enable insolvency practitioners to place relevant information
required under the new rules.
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Two
new directors recently joined the Insolvency’s Service’s senior management
team. Alec Pybus joins as chief operating officer responsible for driving
business performance across our frontline services, strategic and workforce
planning and budget setting. Alec previously worked as an operations director
driving change at the Royal Mail. He replaces Graham Horne who has taken
partial retirement.
Ranuka
Jagpal is the new director of Business Services which includes redundancy
payments, the bankruptcy adjudicator, debt relief unit, the long term asset
distribution teams and the estates account. Ranuka is a career civil servant
and joins us from the Department for Communities and Local Government where she
established the National Planning Casework Unit for statutory cases and more
recently, the national Centre of Excellence for Growth Delivery (European
Regional Development Fund).
 Use
of our website has trebled since we moved on to the GOV.UK platform in 2014 and
we are expecting more than 7 million page views this year. Now that our
presence on the site has bedded in we are looking at how we can improve our
content and make it easier to find. We currently offer a set of specialist
pages on GOV.UK:
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single
complaints page: brings together the ways to make a complaint about anything relating
to insolvency including the Insolvency Service, an official receiver, an insolvency
practitioner, a bankrupt you suspect of wrongdoing or misconduct, or a limited
company or its directors for fraud or misconduct
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tools
for insolvency practitioners (IPs): a single entry point for
IPs providing links to the case management system, director conduct reporting
service, Dear IP, the IP rota, detailed guidance, professional conduct and
regulation information and more
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debt
advisor tools and information: a single entry point for
debt advisors providing links the bankruptcy and DRO application portals,
frequently used search engines, detailed customer guidance and more.
With
the recent completion of the rewrite of our guidance material we will shortly
be launching a new index page to make this information easier to navigate.
Later this year we will conducting an exercise to be ask users what further
changes you would like to see made to our GOV.UK pages. Of course, if in the
meantime if you have suggestions we’d welcome your feedback.
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The
first anniversary of online debtor applications for bankruptcy is coming up in
April. Customer satisfaction with the new service is very high and personal
insolvency statistics published recently show applications have
increased since debtor bankruptcies moved from the court to our Adjudicator –
although numbers remain at historically low levels overall. We are interested
to hear how the new online tool is working for you. Our Adjudicator team will
be hosting an event on 29 March at their Exeter office for debt advice professionals
to reflect on the first year of the online application and Adjudicator services
and discuss how we could further improve both services. If you would like to
attend please email the
team by 28 February 2017. If you cannot attend but would like to give some
feedback on the services we would welcome your comments by email
ahead of the event.
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We
will be hosting Insolvency Live!, our forum for insolvency and creditor
professionals and debt advisors again this coming July. The inaugural forum last year was a
great success and provided an opportunity to update attendees on what we are working on, to ask questions and
to share feedback. Topics covered included reforming the insolvency regime, our
online services, economic trends and their link to personal and
corporate insolvencies and a question and answer session with our senior team
and Board members. We
are now planning for 2017 and are keen to hear from you what topics you would
like the event to cover this year. Please email us with your suggestions and we will do
our best to incorporate your suggestions into the agenda for the event. We will
open registrations for Insolvency Live! in May.
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