Somewhere in your debtor book right now, there are accounts you cannot lawfully or usefully collect on — and you probably don't know which ones.
Not because the information is secret. The opposite: it's published. Every bankruptcy order, every IVA, every debt relief order, every company entering liquidation or administration produces a notice in The Gazette, the UK's official public record. The insolvency status of your debtors is sitting in plain sight.
The question is whether your book has been checked against it lately. For most collections operations, the honest answer is: partially, occasionally, and account by account.
The scale of the problem, in current numbers
The UK's personal insolvency numbers are not background noise anymore. In June 2026, 11,871 individuals entered insolvency in England and Wales — a 16% increase on the same month a year earlier. IVAs alone reached 7,318 in the month, the highest monthly figure since November 2022, and IVAs now account for 58% of all individual insolvencies over the past twelve months. Across that year, roughly one in 369 adults entered a formal insolvency procedure. On top of formal insolvencies, June saw a further 4,495 Breathing Space registrations — statutory moratoriums that pause collection activity entirely.
On the commercial side, 1,845 companies entered insolvency in June 2026, and over the twelve months to June roughly one in 198 companies on the register went into a formal procedure.
Run those rates against a book of 10,000 consumer accounts and the arithmetic is blunt: dozens of your debtors enter a formal insolvency procedure every year. A book skewed toward financially stressed customers — which is what a collections book is by definition — will run well above the population average.
What it costs to collect on the wrong account
An unscreened book doesn't just waste effort. It creates three distinct problems, in ascending order of severity.
Wasted spend. Every letter, call and trace action aimed at a bankrupt or DRO debtor is money spent pursuing a debt that will resolve through the insolvency process, not through your campaign. Agencies working on contingency are spending their own margin; in-house teams are burning capacity that should be pointed at collectable accounts.
Compliance exposure. Debts caught in a bankruptcy, DRO or IVA are subject to statutory protections, and a Breathing Space moratorium legally requires creditors to pause collection and enforcement while it runs. Continuing to chase a protected debt because nobody checked is not a defence regulators have historically found charming — and for FCA-regulated firms it sits badly against treating-customers-fairly obligations.
Missed recoveries. Screening is not only defensive. An insolvency notice is also a deadline: a liquidation or bankruptcy means there is a process to lodge your claim in, and a window in which to do it. The creditor who never spots the notice never files the proof of debt.
Why most books go unscreened: the tooling
The official record has always been searchable — one name at a time. The Gazette's public search takes a single query per search: type a name, read the results, type the next name. Against a book of thousands of accounts, that isn't a workflow, it's a punishment. So screening happens partially: the biggest balances get checked, new placements get spot-checked, and the long tail gets chased blind.
For volume searching, The Gazette's own routes are a manual Research Service — a form submitted by email or post, searched by their staff, returned as a PDF, at published rates starting around £20–£30 per name — or a sales-led Data Service subscription with contact-for-pricing terms. Neither is built for a collections manager who wants to screen this month's placements this morning.
Bulk screening: the whole book, one upload
Gazette Search closes exactly that gap. Upload your debtor book — a CSV or Excel of names or company numbers — and every entry is searched against UK Gazette insolvency notices in a single pass. Results come back in seconds, split into matched, with the notices found against each account, and not found.
From there the workflow writes itself. Matched accounts come off the dialler and out of the letter cycle the same day, and go to your insolvency handling process instead — claim lodged where there's a process to lodge it in, account closed where there isn't. Everything else is confirmed collectable, and your campaigns run against a book you can actually stand behind.
Pricing is pay-as-you-go, per search, published on the pricing page — no subscription, no minimum commitment, no sales call to get a number. You are charged only when a search finds something. Screening stops being a quarterly project and becomes a routine step: new placements screened on arrival, the full book re-run on a cycle.
What good looks like: a screening cadence
On placement. Every new account or portfolio is screened before the first collection action. This is the single highest-value check — it catches the insolvencies that occurred before the debt ever reached you.
On cycle. The live book is re-screened monthly or quarterly. Insolvency is an event, not a state you check once; the June figures above happen every month, and some of them are your accounts.
Before escalation. Litigation, enforcement and doorstep referrals get a final check immediately before instruction. The cost of one search is trivial against the cost of issuing proceedings on a debt that's already in a bankruptcy.
Because you are only charged for accounts that actually return a notice, the thousands of clean accounts in a book cost nothing to check — and screening the whole 10,000 costs a fraction of a single mis-aimed enforcement action.
Prove it on your own book — no signup
You don't need a procurement cycle to test this. The demo panel on the Gazette Search homepage takes a pasted list and returns matches in seconds — no account, no card details, no demo call.
Paste in a segment of accounts you already suspect. If matches come back that your process hadn't caught, the case for screening the rest of the book has made itself.
Frequently asked questions
What do I need to run a screen?
A CSV or Excel file of debtor names or company numbers. Upload it, and every entry is searched in one pass.
Can I screen both consumer and commercial accounts?
Yes — personal insolvency notices (bankruptcies and related procedures) and corporate notices (liquidations, administrations, winding-up petitions) are both part of the published record.
What does it cost?
Pay-as-you-go credits, priced per search, and you are charged only when a search finds something — a clean account costs nothing to screen. Current rates are on the pricing page. There is no subscription or minimum. Continuous screening of very large books is quoted directly.
Is this a credit check?
No. This is a search of the official public insolvency record — it tells you whether a formal insolvency notice exists against a name, which is a different (and complementary) signal to a credit bureau file.