Information relating to Protected Trust Deeds: FOI release

Information requested

Information relating to Protected Trust Deeds for each of the previous five years from 2018 - 2023 inclusive -

1. The number of people who were in receipt of benefits when entering into a Protected Trust Deed.
2. A breakdown of the types of benefits and number of people related to each benefit that applicants were receiving at the time entering into a Protected Trust Deed.
3. The number of people in Protected Trust Deeds whose income level was £18,000 or less.
4. Employment status of people entering into Protected Trust Deeds (self-employed, employed, part-time etc.).
5. A breakdown of the different types of un-secured debts people were seeking to pay back (personal loans, credit and store cards, payday loans, council tax arrears, catalogue debts, credit union debts and bank overdrafts.

Response

I can provide you with some of the information you requested:

Question 1, 2 and 3

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible in this instance the Accountant in Bankruptcy does not record this specific information on our case management system. Therefore, the cost of locating, retrieving and providing this information would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.00 The reason for this is I would have to search each individual trust deed protected in this period (33,028 cases).

You may wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600.00. However, to keep this within the cost I would only be able to provide information on 480 cases.

Question 4

Please find this information on the attached Table.

Question 5

While our aim is to provide information where possible in this instance the Accountant in Bankruptcy does not record this specific information on our case management system. A search of the creditors listed on cases may also only provide limited information as it would not always be possible to specify the type of debt. For example, the creditor is listed as a debt management company, or a bank - the debt could not always be identified as a loan, credit card or overdraft, also if it was a local council - it could always not be identified as council tax, non domestic rates or other debt. Therefore, the cost of locating, retrieving and providing this information would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.00. The reason for this is the cost has already been exceeded by the requests at points 1, 2 and 3. If this search was to be undertaken in isolation the cost would also be exceeded as I would have to search each individual creditor listed on a trust deed protected in this period and this would take an average of two minutes per case.

You may wish to consider reducing the scope of your request for this information only in order the costs can be brought below £600.00. However, to keep this within cost I would only be able to provide information on approximately cases 1,200 cases of the 33,028 held.

I am unable to provide a combined number of cases that could be checked to cover all the information requested as each case does not have a set number of creditors.

About FOI

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FOI - 202300354866 - Information release

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