As the Insolvency Service keep promising us, in addition to the planned legislative changes in the pipeline they are also going to consolidate the secondary legislation in 2011. This means that the period of change that the profession has been going through for the past few years is going to continue for a while yet. These constant changes cause difficulties in keeping staff trained and up to date and also in keeping standard documents accurate and current.
Ideally you should try and help minimise the number of changes that you will need to make to your standard documents when the proposed consolidation of insolvency legislation takes place in 2011. In order to do this we suggest that when you review and revise your standard documents between now and the consolidation, you remove all unnecessary legislative references making them as generic as possible whilst still meeting the statutory and SIP requirements. The vast majority of legislative references in documents are unnecessary, and only seem to have been included as a form of comfort for the IP since they mean little or nothing to the average creditor recipient. For each legislative, or indeed SIP reference in a standard document ask yourself whether it can be removed without leading to that document no longer being statutory or SIP compliant. You will be surprised how many references can be removed.
This approach also has the added benefit of making the documents more "user friendly" for the recipients and hence complying with the approach to reporting to creditors set out in the new Insolvency Code of Ethics.
