UK Parliament / Open data

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, these amendments make minor and technical changes to the Insolvency Act 1986 and relate to the reforms to the debtor bankruptcy petition process introduced by Clause 63. The reforms will remove the existing requirement for the indebted individual to present a bankruptcy petition to court and replace it with a new administrative process. Presently, certain statutory notices are required to be filed at court during the course of a bankruptcy. Most of these requirements are presently set out in the Insolvency Rules. However, a small number of requirements are contained in the Insolvency Act and are the subject of these amendments.

The proposed amendments would ensure that Ministers, in consultation with stakeholders, are able to modernise and make more efficient all of the filing and document inspection processes governing both debtor and creditor initiated bankruptcies without the need to amend the Act in the foreseeable future. It is anticipated that, where the bankruptcy is commenced by way of the debtor making an application to the adjudicator, documents generated will not necessarily be routinely filed at court. While the Government have no intention at present to change the current policy of filing notices at court in relation to creditor-initiated bankruptcies, it is possible that in the future the Government may be minded to extend some or all of the filing efficiencies introduced in relation to debtor-initiated bankruptcies to creditor-initiated bankruptcies.

The strong policy preference is that such detailed procedural requirements, including those relating to filing, should be in the rules and not in the Act. This is in line with a wider government agenda to consider the overall structure of insolvency legislation with a view to ensuring consistency in what is contained within the primary and secondary legislation. One of our aims is to remove detailed prescriptive requirements from the primary legislation wherever possible. The amendments also make other minor and technical changes that are consequential to the reform of the debtor petition process. I beg to move.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
742 c299GC 
Session
2012-13
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
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