Guide to use Personal lending data at neighbourhood level Richard Browne Birmingham City #fairbrum fairbrum.wordpress.com

Background Lending data from some of the major banks in UK has the potential to be extremely useful in addressing financial exclusion Long campaign by the likes of the Community Investment Coalition, and Centre for Responsible Credit to get data released Announced by Treasury in July last year, first data 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’.

So what has been released? 7 participating Lenders have released data - Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS, Santander, Clydesdale & Yorkshire and Nationwide. Data released for: –Personal Loans –Residential Mortgages –Loans to SMEs Data released at Postcode sector level Level of outstanding balances in each sector based on BoE reporting classifications Data reporting 6 months in arrears

What is a postcode sector? 9,000 sectors in UK Not uniform in size or population Not coterminous with other boundaries

How to use the data The data can be downloaded in two places: Mortgage data: Unsecured personal loans and SME loans: Both of these contains aggregated data for all 7 banks and for all postcode sectors in England, Scotland and Wales It is also possible to download data for each bank individually

How to use the data If downloading in XLS. You will see 4 tabs of data. Notes – Background information on the data Postcode Sector Lookup – To lookup data for a specific postcode All Postcode Data – a series of dropdowns through regions so show the relevant data Postcode Sector Data – A simple list of the data

How to use the data Either through tab 3 or 4 you can copy and paste the data relevant to your area Note the “Postcode Area name” column does not link with local authority boundaries

You should now have a list of postcode sectors along with the total outstanding loan in the sector area. You can now map this data or combine it or try and correlate it with other data How to use the data

As stated Postcode Sectors don’t map neatly to Local Authority boundaries – just look at Map of Birmingham! If you want an accurate picture for your local authority you will have to use GIS or a lookup to extract those sectors in your area How to use the data - Mapping

To get the postcode sector boundaries you have to use the Ordnance Surveys Codepoint data set. You usually have to pay for postcode boundary files However if your organisation is part of the OS PSMA (Public Sector Mapping Agreement) then you can get Codepoint with polygons for free. Most local authorities can get this information for free How to use the data - Mapping

If you can only get full postcode boundaries you then need to dissolve the boundaries between different postcodes to get the larger postcode sectors. How to do this depends on your GIS package ArcGIS - MapInfo - How to use the data - Mapping

Mapping the data You can then show simple heat maps of areas with high and low and total lending

You could map how your areas compare to England averages

You will now have a list of postcode sector with a total loan outstanding in each area There is no data for the average loan value Therefore you might want to create an average per adult. To do this you need to download population statistics for each area from the census Get data from: Or I’ve already downloaded it for you here!: How to use the data - Population

This would lead to a more relevant “average map”

Other considerations You could choose to correlate the data against deprivation or other outcomes. You just need to ensure that the data is at postcode sector level For example you can extract proportion of households considered deprived from the 2011 census

Lending Vs Deprivation You could look at correlation between deprivation and lending in your area

Richard Browne uk If you have any questions please ask!