Saturday, 3 February 2007

The Numbers Game.

The 2006 insolvency figures have just been released and we now know that the number of individuals declared bankrupt in the last quarter of 2006 increased by 24.8 per cent on the corresponding quarter of 2005. That's a cool 17,063 people made bankrupt.

The real growth however was in the number of people in the UK taking out individual voluntary arrangements (IVA) and the numbers - compared with the last quarter of 2005 - were up by an incredible 81.9 per cent to 12,741.

These are very big numbers so it's salutory to bear in mind that these figures refer to activity that is controlled by a closed shop of self-regulating professionals. Let's not forget that, by law, only licensed IPs can set up and supervise voluntary arrangements.

But, let's also be charitable and assume that the IP nominee/supervisors fees on each new IVA was only £5,000, That would still give the IPs guaranteed additional fee income over the next five years of £63,705,000 - and that's just from crop of new volunteers in the last three months of 2006.

Did anyone else wonder how the bigger players managed to fund all of those TV ads telling folks how government legislation now enabled them to pay off only a fraction of their debts ?

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