One of Mrs Farah’s friends met her in the supermarket and stopped her to ask:
”How about NOW? Is Mo an internationally acclaimed medal-winning athlete yet?”
Mo’s mum had got used to the question, it having been asked of her a number of times before, but was a little tired of the impatience of those around her. She sucked her teeth, a habit she had acquired: “Not yet. It’s still too soon. He is only seven months old. Come back in 20 years.”
We won’t have to wait 20 years for the big insolvency wave to break, but it is a very similar story with the Government statistics about the number of cases in our glorious profession reported in the Insolvency Service’s quarterly national insolvency release in August. The NTI newsroom have been sitting on this one for a couple of days awaiting inspiration, but none has come. To the question; ‘what is the situation NOW?’ The short answer is, it is still too soon to report any notable change.
The longer answer is, overall numbers of company and individual insolvencies remained low in August 2020, when compared with the same month in 2019. We pride ourselves on being very different providers of news and opinion at NTI, but there really is nothing new to report. Babies are still being born and BBC’s The One Show is still supremely annoying.
The fact is, continued reduced operational running of the courts and curtailed HMRC actions, blended with enduring restrictions on statutory demands and winding-up petitions with a massive dollop of ongoing Government support, has resulted in a blurring of the individual and corporate insolvency landscapes, as if we are seeing them through eight milk bottle bases all glued together.
We get that you cannot have the ambition to be the place everyone in restructuring, insolvency and business goes for news and not report the full stuff when it crawls out of a dark hole, so if you are still reading, the detail is that in August 2020 there was a total of 778 company insolvencies in England and Wales, comprised of 586 CVLs, 66 Compulsory Liquidations, 110 Administrations,15 CVAs and one Receivership (really? A whole one?). This overall number is down 43 per cent on the same time in 2019.
There were 1,332 DROs and 769 Bankruptcies in England and Wales last month, (made up of 708 debtor Bankruptcies and 61 creditor Bankruptcies). There was a 31 per cent reduction in DROs and (that number again) a 43 per cent reduction in Bankruptcies in August 2020, compared with the same month last year.
In more interesting news (if your eyes have drifted this far down the screen), when a vaccine for Covid-19 becomes available, and assuming every human being on the planet (and Philip Green) will require one dose, shipping the requisite amount will necessitate the equivalent of 8,000 Boeing 747s (which prols know as ‘Jumbo Jets’).
Also, the Coro ... blah, blah, blah has provided a huge opportunity for Italy’s Mafia, due to an unprecedented need for ready cash, as many Italian businesses had been unable to pay rents and salaries before state aid began to flow. Loan sharks filled the void, with business owners succumbing to offers of easy money at extortionate interest rates. Warms the heart, doesn’t it?
Happy Sunday.
