Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the main criteria for judging whether an insolvency regime is successful.

It is not simple to compare different insolvency regimes. The World Bank methodology for ‘Resolving Insolvency’ uses principally an assessment of speed and amount of returns to creditors but also has introduced more subjective tests of the strength of the framework. In the World Bank’s 2016 Doing Business Report, the UK continues to be 7th in the world for returns to creditors, and is quicker and costs less than the US, Germany and France, but does somewhat less well on the subjective factors, which may understate the strengths of our regime. We keep the UK’s insolvency regime under review to ensure it remains at the forefront of best practice and that possible new features are properly considered.