Parents, headmasters, hoteliers, restauranteurs, insurers and countries love them or hate them, depending on how their school or restaurant, company or nation is ranked. I’m referring to the World Bank’s annual Doing Business, for countries, league tables of course. For all their ?aws, league tables are everywhere, and the World Bank is closely followed by our government and others. The UK’s plans for reforming insolvency law are profoundly informed by its ranking for the ease and ef?ciency of doing business and its ambition to move up the tables.

Slipping down the ladder -

To climb the World Bank league table the UK must move closer to the best practices and rubrics of the World Bank in each of the areas on which it is scored. We’ve slipped down the insolvency ranking since the scoring system changed and to climb again we must change, or ‘close the distance to frontier of best practice’ as the World Bank describes it. That is why the reforms proposed last spring by the Insolvency Service3 were so redolent of Chapter 11, because certain elements of Chapter 11 are baked into the World Bank’s (and UNCITRAL’s) vision of best practice for an insolvency system.

Originally published in Recovery Magazine on April 21, 2017.