Are UK businesses facing catastrophe due to vast coronavirus debt burdens?

Has massive borrowing during the crisis created an unsustainable burden on firms? And should ministers be exploring radical options to lift it? Ben Chu explains

Smaller companies have primarily filled their cash flow deficits through state-backed loans, mainly the Bounce Back loans programme (Getty)

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered the largest economic shock to the UK economy in three centuries.

And yet, even as their revenues have collapsed, the number of British business insolvencies has, remarkably, fallen, not risen, this year.

This is, in large part, because firms have been able to access special state-backed bank loans.