Corporate report

The Insolvency Service Strategy 2021 to 2026

Published 10 September 2021

Introduction

The Insolvency Service helps to deliver economic confidence, ensuring that our insolvency regime works for all stakeholders and gives confidence to those that invest and do business in the United Kingdom. Our work supports a level playing field for business that encourages entrepreneurship, helps viable businesses to be rescued, and ensures that there are effective and efficient processes for dealing with financial failure. Through our leadership of the UK’s insolvency industry we are helping to make the UK the best place to start and grow a business by supporting innovation in the insolvency regime and evolving how we deliver our public services, supporting and developing our people, and keeping the UK’s insolvency regime at the forefront of global standards and practices.

We are an executive agency of the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and as well as aligning our core principles, we share best practice and expertise in effective and ambitious policy making, ensuring we are a key player in supporting the efficacy of economic policy delivery across government.

This five-year strategy aims to ensure that we have an agency fit for the future; one which will support businesses and citizens as the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and helps the UK economy to thrive. We will also continue to ensure that we deliver excellent standards of public services, putting our customers and stakeholders at the heart of everything we do.

Our purpose

As an executive agency of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Insolvency Service works to help make the UK the best place to start and grow a business. The UK’s insolvency regime plays a vital role in supporting economic growth by ensuring that businesses and citizens in financial difficulty can access effective and efficient insolvency processes that deliver the best outcomes possible for employees, creditors and investors. An effective and well-regulated insolvency regime supports the economy by ensuring that viable businesses can be rescued, preserving jobs and productivity for the long term. A well-functioning insolvency regime also creates a positive environment for lending and investing.

Our core purpose of delivering economic confidence underlines our commitment to supporting those in financial distress, tackling financial wrongdoing and maximising returns to creditors, through a highly skilled and dedicated team.

Our strategy sets out how we will evolve the agency and seek to improve the insolvency regime over the next five years to ensure it supports the UK economy as effectively as possible and makes a positive contribution to the country’s economic growth.

Our vision

Our vision is for the Insolvency Service to be at the centre of a fair, efficient and effective insolvency system that is a global leader in insolvency solutions for citizens and for businesses, underpinned and supported by a profession that is recognised for the highest professional, technical and ethical standards when carrying out its work.

In its operations, we want the agency to provide value for money services to those affected by financial distress or failure, and for it to play an important role in supporting the integrity of the marketplace for business and citizens through its investigation and enforcement activities.

Our ambitions include:

• Fewer avoidable insolvencies through new guidance and education initiatives upstream of financial failure

• A clear and accessible user journey for people in financial distress

• An agency that is a great place to develop a career with tools and technology to deliver excellent services

• An inclusive and innovative organisation fit for the future

• More connectivity across government and the insolvency industry to share best practice

• An insolvency framework that delivers the best outcomes possible for our stakeholders

We will:

Strengthen

Our system regulation and improve the insolvency framework

Our reputation and impact in investigation and enforcement

Sharpen

Our operating focus in Official Receiver Services

Our financial model to ensure sustainability

Shape

And modernise our technology and infrastructure

The agency as a great place to work

A new approach to prevent insolvency and rehabilitate thorough education and guidance

Strengthen

Strengthen our system regulation and improve the insolvency framework

We aim to deliver a stronger insolvency regime that works as effectively as possible for all its stakeholders and to work with government to deliver a robust regulatory regime. This will help to ensure value for money and better returns to creditors from an insolvency procedure, with Insolvency Practitioners operating to high standards and with regulatory consistency, improving public confidence in the insolvency regime.

We will keep the insolvency regime under review throughout, pursuing opportunities to improve outcomes and increase efficiency. In particular, we will review the personal insolvency landscape, to ensure the options for citizens in financial difficulty are accessible, proportionate, and deliver the best outcomes for both individuals and their creditors.

In collaboration with HM Treasury we have already launched the Breathing Space service to provide people in problem debt vital access to professional debt advice and a period of protection from creditors, giving them time to work with money advisors to find a suitable debt solution. To complement this, we will continue to collaborate with HM Treasury to deliver a service for money advisors, debtors and creditors to operate new Statutory Debt Repayment Plans. SDRP will enable someone in problem debt to enter a statutory agreement to repay their debts in full to a manageable timetable, leading to increased returns to creditors and helping people to take control of their finances.

In addition to stretching internal performance measures, at a strategic level we will measure our progress by:

• Tracking stakeholders’ confidence in the insolvency regime.

Strengthen the impact of our investigation and enforcement activities

Our goal is to be an effective regulator, ensuring a level playing field for business by tackling financial wrongdoing by directors, and people subject to bankruptcy and debt relief orders. To provide the most impact from our activities we need to apply our finite resources in a way which upholds the integrity of the insolvency regime and protects the public and businesses from those whose actions have caused financial harm and deters others from similar acts.

To improve the effectiveness of our investigation and enforcement activities, we will introduce a new Strategic Assessment, updated annually, to help us identify, direct and prioritise our enforcement activity.

We will work across departments to ensure we help deliver the Government’s priorities in preventing wrong-doing and improving public confidence in the corporate and insolvency regimes.

We will raise the profile and impact of the agency’s enforcement work by increasing publicity of our criminal and civil enforcement outcomes, clearly articulating the value of the outcomes achieved in terms of protecting the public, deterring others and punishing those who have committed criminal offences.

We will measure our progress at a strategic level by developing a new method of tracking stakeholder confidence in the enforcement regime.

Sharpen

Sharpen our operating focus in Official Receiver Services

We will continue the transformation of our Official Receiver Services and evolve our operating model with the development and implementation of a new digital case management system to deliver enhanced intelligence capabilities, lower cost through the automation of tasks, and improved digital services for our customers.

We will develop a new National Interest Case operating strategy to ensure we have the appropriate protocols and financial model in place to respond to future significant and complex cases such as British Steel and Carillion.

We will also ensure our specialists undertake a programme of continuous professional development and achieve qualifications to support their work and build the agency’s capability.

In addition to internal performance measures, we will measure our progress at a strategic level by:

• Tracking stakeholder confidence in the insolvency regime.

• Improved case handling and outcomes.

Sharpen our financial model to ensure financial sustainability and value for money

We aim to ensure that the different funding models for each area of the agency are sustainable. We will look to make changes to ensure the Official Receiver’s work on low assets cases is adequately funded and viable in the long term. We will improve our financial management of the agency generally through the development of new management information systems that can provide accurate unit cost data to support decision making and drive efficiency savings and evidence value for money service delivery.

We will measure our progress on this by:

• Achievement of financial sustainability where our cost base is matched by our income and funding.

Shape

Shape a new approach to help prevent insolvencies and support directors through education and guidance

We want to help reduce the number of avoidable insolvencies by supporting directors upstream of insolvency.

To do this we will develop a dedicated web resource of educational materials that provide company directors with clear, accessible advice and signposts them to further support. It will also include a new company health check tool that will help directors by flagging the early indicators of possible insolvency. To help directors of companies which have failed we will develop training materials to support Directors to learn from the experience and hopefully avoid insolvency in the future.

Shape and modernise our technology and infrastructure

We aim to become a ‘digital first’ service provider, customer-focused and recognised as one of the easiest and most efficient government agencies to do engage with. We want the agency’s infrastructure of systems and offices to provide a great environment for colleagues to undertake their important work effectively, and for the public to be able to access our services and interact with our systems easily.

We will replace several legacy IT systems and implement a new, integrated case management system to all operational business areas across the agency. We will continue our Remediation Programme to ensure all our legacy line of business applications are fully supported in the meantime, reducing the risk to service delivery from IT-related problems.

We will also develop and deliver an agency data strategy that will improve the quality of our data, enabling better evidence-based decision-making, improved operational efficiency and organisational insight, including the delivery of this strategy. We will modernise the handling, storage and maintenance of our data so that we have a consolidated records management system that is easy to use, removes duplication, and continues to meet the standards for data security. We will deliver improved collaboration tools to enable closer working internally and with other government departments and partner organisations to share data and documents securely and effectively.

We will enable customers to proactively access information and interact with us through a range of enquiry channels which are both efficient for us and convenient for customers by introducing automated communication and customer self-service portals and webchats. We will also seek to digitise services where appropriate, to reduce paper documents and develop more efficient methods of customer communication.

We will measure our progress by:

• Results from our People survey and customer feedback

Shape the agency as a great place to work

Our organisation must be resilient, flexible and scalable with the ability to handle variable levels of activity that may be difficult to predict due to a changing economic environment. We want to increase the attractiveness of the agency as a great place to work with varied career pathways built from our core expertise in insolvency. We want people who specialise in insolvency to see the agency as place to further their career and build their skills and experience. We will ensure that people working in the agency are able to access excellent learning opportunities from across the government’s professions, but also through continuous professional development of specialist insolvency skills with dedicated training programs for new and experienced insolvency specialists.

Our People Strategy aims to support the delivery of a diverse and inclusive work force. We want a workplace where everyone feels comfortable to be their authentic selves and share their experiences. Where everyone feels open to discuss issues that matter, where wellbeing is treated as a priority and where we have a culture that is inclusive, supported by a clear set of agency values and behaviours.

To do this we will ensure that diversity and inclusion is a fundamental part of our decision making and change plans. We will review and align the agency Diversity and Inclusion strategy with the wider Civil Service plans and raise awareness across the agency through the support we give our staff network groups, professional development and effective internal communications.

The agency is a Partner Organisation (PO) in the BEIS Five-Year Sustainability Strategy for 2021/22 to 2025/2026. The strategy sets out their ambition to improve sustainability and achieve net zero and brings together the commitments and targets to achieve this.

We will work with BEIS on improving environmental sustainability and develop our own Environmental Strategy and ambitious targets that align with those of BEIS where appropriate. We will invest in a dedicated resource to lead our Sustainability agenda and we will continue to report regularly on our Greening Government Commitments, whilst our Environmental Strategy will underpin our Estates Strategy work.

We will measure our progress by:

• Becoming a Civil Service High Performer status in overall engagement

• Tracking our benchmark scores from diversity assessments

Our delivery plans

To achieve our vision will require multiple workstreams with varying complexity and funding requirements. Our high-level delivery plan below summarises the key projects on the journey. We will report against progress annually.

Theme	Year one	Year two	Years three, four and five
STRENGTHEN our system regulation and improve the insolvency framework	Develop thinking regarding insolvency practitioner regulation		Implement Recommendations
	Commence review of personal insolvency landscape	Develop new approaches to personal insolvency
	Deliver Breathing Space scheme
	Collaborate with HM Treasury to develop Statutory Debt Repayment Plans		Deliver Statutory Debt Repayment Plans
STRENGTHEN our reputation and impact in investigation and enforcement	Complete Strategic Assessment	Annual review of Strategic Assessment	Annual review of Strategic Assessment
	Continue work with Companies House on reform programme		Deliver a targeted communications strategy aimed at deterring misconduct
SHARPEN our operating focus in Official Receiver Services (ORS)	Develop Official Receiver Services Operating Model (stage 1)	Undertake a review of the Official Receiver Role	Further development of the Official Receiver Services Operating model (Stages 2 and 3)
	Official Receivers’ Professionalism (Stage 1)		Official Receivers’ professionalism (Stage 2)
	National Interest Cases Support Strategy		Re-define interaction and relations with external stakeholders
SHAPE a new approach to prevent insolvency and rehabilitate through education and guidance	Develop Company Healthcheck Tool	Develop Director Awareness Tool
SHAPE and modernise our technology and infrastructure	Develop our Case Management Capability	Digitise our document generation	Improve our use of online collaboration tools
	Develop our agency Data Strategy	Data and Information management improvement	Introduce automated communication and customer self-service portals and webchats
	Application Enhancement and Development
	Deliver digital services for our customers
	Implement our Estates Strategy
SHAPE the agency as a great place to work	Implement our People Strategy	Develop a new Organisation design model
	Introduce Skills Audit Tool	Implement HR Shared Services
	Develop an Environmental Sustainability plan
SHARPEN our financial model to ensure sustainability	Review Official Receiver Services Financial Sustainability	Improve financial management information	Review of Non-Official Receiver Services Funding
	Develop thinking on Sustainable Cost Base		Financial implications of changes to the Official Receiver role
	Improve our Capacity for investment