When creditors were stopped from collecting
Every petition to wind a company up filed in the High Court since January 2010 — 109,947 of them across 202 months. A winding-up petition is the last step a creditor takes: it asks the court to end the company and sell what is left.
HMRC brought 369 of the 747 petitions in January 2020, and 2 of the 188 in April 2020. It is now back to 436 of 714 — 61% of everything. The state is the single largest creditor in the winding-up court, and it stopped completely for two years.
Last complete month
714
October 2026. Since January 2013, only 15 months have been busier.
The floor
46
April 2021 — 90% below the 482 a month that was normal from 2015 to 2019.
Months held down
24
Apr 2020 to Mar 2022, averaging 102 a month against a normal 482 — the longest run below half the long-run median.
The same instrument, two purposes
Petitions filed 2016–2023, by how they ended. A withdrawal usually means the debt got paid — the petition was leverage rather than an attempt to end the company.
HMRC
13,571 resolved · 209 days to a winding-up order
Private creditors
13,054 resolved · 364 days to a winding-up order
Days to a winding-up order are measured to the last time the court touched the record, which stands in for the order date rather than being it. Cohorts before 2016 are excluded: HMCTS never closed those records, so their outcomes are missing rather than pending.
How this is counted
Every case the court files under Companies — Petition naming a winding up. Petitions on the unfair prejudice track are a shareholder remedy rather than a creditor one, and are not counted here.
The shaded stretch is not an annotation of policy. It is simply the longest unbroken run of months below half the long-run median, found in the data — it happens to land on Apr 2020 to Mar 2022, the period when creditors were restricted from presenting petitions at all.
A month appears only once the corpus covers all of it, so the series ends at October 2026 rather than at today’s date — filings held run to 2026-11-06. A gap means absence from the record, not absence from the courts.