In December 2013 major lenders in the UK published details of borrowing to individuals and businesses at a local  level for the first time.  This voluntary move by select institutions provides details of more than £1 trillion of  lending  across  Britain  comprised  of  residential  mortgage  balances,  loans  to small  and  medium‐sized  enterprises (SMEs) and unsecured loans to personal customers.  The industry‐wide data has been compiled jointly by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) and the Council  for Mortgage Lenders (CML).  This presentation outlines what the data shows in Birmingham. The full report can be downloaded from here: http://citysavecreditunion.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/personal-loans-birmingham.pdf

1. Personal lending data at neighbourhood
level in Birmingham
Richard Browne
Partnership Manager
Birmingham City Council
Twitter:
@richardbrowne80
@fairbrum
#fairbrum
fairbrum.wordpress.com
20th March 2014

2. Background
• Long campaign by the likes of the Community
Investment Coalition, and Centre for
Responsible Credit
• Announced by Treasury in July last year,
finally released in December
• Danny Alexander: ‘enable smaller lenders
identify gaps in the market and allow
businesses to hold their local bank to account
where they aren’t lending’.

3. So what has been released?
• Participating Lenders - Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS, Santander,
Clydesdale & Yorkshire and Nationwide.
• Data released in December for loans at end of June on:
– Personal Loans
– Residential Mortgages
– Loans to SMEs
• Postcode sector level
• Level of outstanding balances based on BoE reporting
classifications
• Does not show the number of loans in each postcode sector –
just the outstanding balances

4. What is a postcode sector?
• 9,000 sectors in UK
• Not uniform in size or population
• Not coterminous with other
boundaries
• “Birmingham” postcode area there
are 228 sectors, but for Birmingham
Local Authority boundary there is
126

6. Birmingham Totals
• £463 million loans
• Per capita less than England as a whole
• Difficult to get a true picture of average
lending

9. Lending Vs Deprivation
• Some
correlation
between
lending and
deprivation
although not
statistically
significant

10. Citysave Comparison
• Compared
credit union
loan data with
the banking
data
• Responsible
correlation that
there were
lending in the
same areas

12. Conclusions
• Data release welcome but limited
• Useful for Credit Unions and LAs
• Be even more useful to have high interest lenders
data
• Need more attributes to really begin look at the
complexities of how banks lend
• Could look at the HDMA dataset in the United States
• Additional information includes: number of
transactions, individual loans amounts, and markers
of level of interests

13. Richard Browne
Richard.browne@birmingham.gov.
uk
Twitter: @richardbrowne80