Lord Harrison – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Harrison on 2016-02-26.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the World Bank’s methodology for producing its Resolving Insolvency rankings.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

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.