UK statutory credit reports
With the threat of a world recession around the corner it’s time for us to all tighten our purse strings. So to make sure I’m up to date on money issues I decided to subscribe to the Radio 4 Moneybox podcast.
Having listened to the show at the weekend I thought I’d share with you something that I didn’t know and could have been useful a few weeks ago. The main topic was credit reports and the information contained within them. In case you don’t know what they are, these are the reports that financial institutions use in order to determine whether you’re a high financial risk or not. If you’re not then they’ll happily lend you money (…and then send you a million letters, pre-filled in credit card forms and the like offering you more loans for the next ten years and hence exposing you to identity fraud but hey, that’s another story altogether!) So this became pertinent to us because we were applying for a loan a few months ago. Given the credit crunch crisis that has been happening in the US and UK, banks are more reluctant to lend money to people who haven’t banked with them before. In this case we were refused a loan and this caused us to question our credit reports.
The two main credit report companies in the UK are Equifax and Experian and both companies offer services to help you to view your credit reports. But here’s the rub; you can see your “free” report if you give your credit card details and hence sign up for a monthly fee. It’s the classic tactic that big companies use in order to tie you into a monthly fee which you quickly forget to cancel. But did you know you can get a “statutory credit report” for only £2.00? No, neither did I until I heard Paul Lewis from Moneybox talking about it. The don’t really make this clear on their respective websites so that you end up signing up for a recurring fee. Obviously, they have to make money and their argument is that the £2.00 fee was set by the UK government over ten years ago and now doesn’t cover costs. While I do appreciate this, I can’t help but feel that they hide where these cheap credit reports are in order to make more people sign up for a monthly fee, as was discussed by Anna Fielder from the National Consumer Council on this episode of Moneybox.
So to make life easier I thought I’d deep link into the sites so anyone who has found this website looking for statutory credit report information can easily find the pages.
Here is the link for an Experian statutory credit report.
And here’s the link for an Equifax statutory credit report.
Hope it helps someone out as I could have done with this before I signed up for a monthly fee!
Picture by Austin Evans under Creative Commons licence
