Individual Voluntary Arrangement statistics and monitoring

The IPC recommended in its Annual Report for 2004 that the insolvency profession should gather statistics on the completion and failure rate of IVAs so that a proper assessment can be made of the effectiveness of this particular vehicle for dealing with individual insolvencies, and to meet its obligations for public accountability.

Following improvements in the software at its Birmingham Register the IS has now made a commitment to supply the RPBs with quarterly statistics, showing the completion and failure rates of the IVAs set up and supervised by each of the IPs they license. We understand that the data for the last six or seven years show a failure rate of around 27% in the first part of the period, subsequently falling to about 25%.

The further recommendation made in the IPC Annual Report for 2005 that the IS should collect and make available regular annual data on the financial outturns of individual IVAs in electronic form has not yet been taken forward as this would require new secondary legislation.

Recommendations
We recommend that the RPBs should now use the quarterly completion/failure statistics on IVAs, supplied by the Insolvency Service, to monitor the performance of their individual IPs and the firms employing them and to ask for explanations from those IPs whose failure rates are significantly higher than the national average. We also recommend that the RPBs and the Insolvency Service should consider publishing the completion/failure rates of individual IPs in a form readily accessible to creditors and the general public.

We recommend that the IS should seek to remove the legal obstacles to collecting regular data in electronic form showing the financial outcomes of IVAs and should then as soon as possible supply this data to the RPBs for use in monitoring the performance of their IPs.

Home I News I Contact IPC I Useful Links I About IPC