Tweet
- IVAs accounted for 59% of 24,531 personal insolvencies in England and Wales
- Quarterly total 15.7% higher than year earlier and 6.7% increase on Q4 2016
- Estimated 3,967 company insolvencies recorded in Q1, down 29.1% on Q4 2016
The number of people becoming insolvent hit a three-year high in March as British households start to struggle with large debts taken on over years of cheap credit. Most of the rise was by individual voluntary arrangements, arrangements where money owed is shared out between creditors. IVAs accounted for 59 per cent of the 24,531 personal insolvencies recorded across England and Wales last month. That total was the highest level since the second quarter of 2014, according to the Insolvency Service. The quarterly total is 15.7 per cent higher than the same period a year earlier and a 6.7 per cent increase compared with the final quarter of 2016.
Debt relief orders (DROs) - available to people with less than £20,000 of debt - accounted for a quarter (25 per cent) of personal insolvencies between January and March, while the remaining 16 per cent were bankruptcies, which are often seen as a ‘last resort’. Meanwhile, an estimated 3,967 companies entered insolvency in the first quarter of 2017, down 29.1 per cent fall compared with the last three months of 2016, but up by 5.3 per cent compared with the first quarter of 2016. The Insolvency Service said a ‘one-off event’ in the final quarter of 2016 had been behind an unusually high number of company insolvencies in the last three months of 2016.
Read more here