Guest post by James from Double Glazing Forum
Many thanks to both Goronwy Jones and the RCG for both picking up, and questioning the figures I’ve been posting over on the Double Glazing Forum on liquidation.
I’ve been getting these figures from the London Gazette – which is, to my knowledge, the only official publication that contains all notices of bankruptcy orders in the UK, and have been putting them straight up onto the site from the data provided.
I’ve found that some of the duplicates are down to the difficulty in collected data for a specific industry – more on this below. In addition, having gone through the data, there have been occasions where a company name appears with a different company number. I don’t know the reason for this, and have not been able to clarify. Ultimately though the duplicated figures appearing on the site are down to my own carelessness rather than any attempt to deceive, and although there are several possible explanations of how the duplicates came to be (see below), there isn’t one definite answer.
To correct the data set, I’ve gone through and filtered out duplicates on the site, and from now on will be cross referencing that with the latest month’s figures, keeping only the earliest mention of insolvency that I find.
Here is the corrected version of a graph RCG put up at http://renegadeconservatoryguy.co.uk/tag/double-glazing-forum/ in early October. You’ll see that whilst the figures themselves are off (for example, the corrected figure for May 2009 is 267, not 321 as I incorrectly printed) the trend remains the same, and lags behind consumer confidence.
The same lag appears when you check against consumer spending (both consumer confidence and consumer spending data downloaded from Nationwide.
Originally, the list over at the DGF wasn’t intended to give an overview of change through time in regard to insolvencies, but rather serve as a resource for people who are concerned that they may have issued a deposit to a company that has gone into insolvency, or people who worry that they have had work done under warrantee by a company that has gone into liquidation.
As time moves forward and I have more data, I hope that people will be able to use the DGF list to check that a company they are considering for a quote have not experienced bankruptcy in their recent past – companies moving in and out of receivership is one potential reason for the duplicates in my data, and is something that some people may want to know about a company they are planning to get a quote from.
As a final use for the data I hoped that in some cases there would be evidence of so-called Phoenix Companies – information that would be of use to homeowners as they researched firms – and in some cases there is indeed mention of individuals’ new ventures, though unfortunately anyone really mischievous would not necessarily show up here.
There are of course some limitations to the data I get. For one, I am only interested in companies in a specific industry, and filtering these companies out of the larger set of data (i.e. ‘just double glazing firms’ from ‘all firms’) can only be done to a certain degree of accuracy (when they have Windows in their business title it helps…).
Regarding the inaccuracy of my own past data, I think there may have been issue with this filtering (because a company moving through the stages of receivership has the potential to be added to my data more than once as more information is made public by the receiver) and also, when there is longer time gaps between the duplicate entries, because of entry and then re-entry into bankruptcy.
I hope that from now on the data will be a more accurate representation of what’s going on, and that it can serve as a useful resource for as many people as possible.
To view the updated figures visit:
http://www.double-glazing-forum.com/bankrupt-double-glazing-companies.aspx
