The Insolvency Service Annual Report and Accounts 2020-2021
Insolvency Service Annual Report and Accounts 2020-2021
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Chief Executive’s Foreword
2020-21 was an important year for the Insolvency Service. We played a key role supporting business through the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 providing new support and rescue options for struggling businesses. Temporary restrictions on compulsory winding-up of companies and the rules for wrongful trading have helped protect businesses from going under and have given directors confidence to keep trading throughout the pandemic. In March 2020, the government issued instructions to work from home wherever possible. Our response was to close our 22 offices to all but essential business attendance and to transition to the delivery of our services remotely. As a result of investments previously made in our IT infrastructure, and with many staff already used to working some of their time from home each month, we were able to readily adapt to more widespread home-working to keep our people and our customers safe.
We built on this capability and flexibility as COVID-19 continued to impact on society and the economy, in order to support the effective delivery of our services to customers and stakeholders. New communication tools also helped us to successfully onboard new recruits, interns, and apprentices during the lockdown periods, as well as undertake our insolvency and investigation enquiries remotely with third parties, avoiding the need for many face-to-face meetings.
With home-working capability firmly embedded across the organisation, redundancy claims, bankruptcy applications, Debt Relief Orders and insolvency estate payments were able to be processed effectively, maintaining our essential services to businesses and citizens at a critical time, supporting those in financial distress.
Government financial support for businesses and the temporary restrictions on statutory demands and winding-up petitions reduced the number of new insolvency cases across the year. The number of cases handled by Official Receivers fell by 42% in 2020-21, with court-initiated procedures falling by 70%, whilst debt relief orders fell by 33%. However, the number of claims to the Redundancy Payments Service increased by 20% on the previous year, and the team worked hard to ensure that there was no disruption to our service, with redundancy payments made on average in 12.8 days, 3 days earlier than in 2019-20 and under the Annual Plan target of 14 days.
Tackling financial wrongdoing continues to be a key corporate objective of the agency. The impact of the lockdown restrictions on the courts, and the challenges in obtaining evidence and co-operation from third parties, meant that some of our investigation work took longer to conclude last year. We were still able to complete the disqualification of 981 directors for corporate misconduct, achieve 143 successful criminal prosecutions, undertake 146 investigations into live companies and secure 302 bankruptcy restriction orders and undertakings.
Overall the agency produced a solid performance in 2020-21 and I was very proud of how our people rose to the significant and unprecedented challenges faced. The support we gave our people throughout last year with new policies for flexible working and regular guidance on safe working throughout COVID-19, was reflected in our highest ever People Survey engagement result in 2020.
Our commitment to ensuring we continue to be a great place to work was also enshrined in a new five-year People Strategy published in November, which set out key objectives for building greater capability and flexibility across our teams, championing diversity and inclusion and developing brilliant leaders for the future.
Looking ahead we will continue to build on what we have learned over the last 12 months to ensure that the agency continues to grow and improve its service delivery, delivering economic confidence for businesses and citizens and supporting economic recovery.
Dean Beale - Chief Executive
Performance Overview
Supporting those in financial distress
11,607 New insolvency cases received
9,830 Online bankruptcy orders
999 Creditor petition bankruptcies
17,938 Debt Relief Orders
96,219 Redundancy payment requests
On average it takes 12.8 calendar days to action payments
Tackling financial wrongdoing
981 Directors disqualified for misconduct
8.5% Disqualified for 10 years or more
302 Bankruptcy restrictions
146 Live company investigations
143 Criminal prosecutions
Maximising returns to creditors
£35.9m In dividends returned to creditors
66.53% Reports to creditors issued within 15 calendar days of an attended interview
Customer satisfaction
84% Customer satisfaction results
Updates to this page
Last updated 10 November 2021 + show all updates
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HTML version of annual report added
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First published.