You asked
As per the Freedom of Information Act please could you provide Equifax data the ONS regularly collects on UK household debt as part of the UK Flow of Fund Statistics.
Please provide these data monthly (or quarterly if this is not possible) from the earliest collected (e.g. January 2015) to latest available (e.g. March 2020) by local authority region.
For each of these time periods and geographies please provide the following statistics:
Outstanding debt by product: mortgage, motor finance, credit cards, current accounts, telco, unsecured personal loans, other household debt.
% of consumers with debt by product: any outstanding debt, any non-mortgage debt, any mortgage debt, any motor finance debt, any credit cards debt, any current accounts debt, any telco debt, any unsecured personal loan debt, any other household debt
Of those consumers with any debt: average outstanding debt, average non-mortgage debt.
Of those consumers with any non-mortgage debt: average outstanding non-mortgage debt.
If you also have details of new account openings and stages of arrears and defaults please provide these - I could not see them in the prior published statistics so appreciate they may not be collected.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Unfortuntately, we are unable to publish the data you have requested as it is considered personal information. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.