There are two views that have been mentioned recently, one is that bankruptcy should have a reduced term to 1 year and the second is that banks have a veto on insolvency deals.

Perhaps the best way to resolve the issue isn’t to make bankruptcy one year for everybody, but rather to make it one year when and where a bank has rejected an insolvency solution put forward by a personal insolvency practitioner.

This would mean their decision to veto has a negative impact upon them, there are consequences to rejecting genuine offers. Obviously this would require some tweaking because individual cases and circumstances can become quite complex, but it would certainly help a creditor to sharpen their mind if they knew that a refusal could then have worse outcomes without affecting their contractual rights.

The good thing about this is that it would also channel more people into the proper route for dealing with debt (the official regulated insolvency one) and keep them out of what will probably become a scandal some day in the future (the informal channel where there are few rules and no primary legislation backed end dates).