Ms Madeleine Reid:

This is a facultative measure so it would not require us to stop offering the existing personal insolvency protection to individuals. There is no problem with member states doing more than the directive requires. Where we might see some difficulties is that the proposal seems to be influenced primarily by Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. That seems to have been taken as a familiar model, and I would agree with my colleague that the commission seems to be looking primarily at a large number of member states which do not have anything like this sort of restructuring. The difficulty is that Chapter 11 does not sit entirely with aspects of our examinership and personal insolvency court review which we think are working well, and we have some concerns about that.