Individual voluntary arrangements: A ‘fresh start’ for salaried consumer debtors in England and Wales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Since the mid‐1990s the number of consumer insolvencies in England and Wales has grown exponentially. The UK's Insolvency Act 1986 offers two formal responses to personal insolvency: bankruptcy and individual voluntary arrangements (‘IVAs’). While consumers have used both these debt relief mechanisms in increasing numbers in recent years, IVAs—regulated agreements between debtors and creditors facilitated by a licensed insolvency practitioner, usually taking the form of a 5‐year payment plan—grew faster than bankruptcies between 2003 and 2006. However, the level of new IVA approvals fell back in 2007 and the first half of 2008. This article charts the transformation of the IVA from a bankruptcy alternative originally designed for insolvent traders and professionals into a tool of consumer debt relief. It then seeks to explain both the stellar rise in IVA usage among consumer debtors and the subsequent stalling of IVA growth. The rise of consumer IVAs can be attributed largely to supply side changes in the market for debt resolution—in particular the emergence of volume providers commonly referred to as ‘IVA factories’—while a sustained backlash against the procedure and the providers instigated by institutional creditors demanding higher recoveries accounts for the subsequent decline in approvals. The article concludes by considering the near‐term prospects for consumer IVAs within the context of the increasingly complex UK debt resolution market. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".