Companies, damned companies and statistics – corporate insolvency through the years: have we got it right with the existing regimes?

Abstract

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.