Information on firms with permissions for entering into regulated credit agreement as lender and debt-counselling - December 2023

First request: 

Please provide list of all firms with the following permission:

Entering into regulated credit agreement as Lender (Excluding high-cost short-term credit, bill of sale agreement, and home collected credit agreement).

Second request: 

Please can I have a list of all firms with permissions for Debt-counselling.

Before answering your requests, we should explain that we aggregated your two separate requests and processed them both in accordance with FOIA as one request under the reference number shown above.  Guidance issued by the Information Commissioner permits a public authority to aggregate requests in the following circumstances (amongst others):

• Two or more requests for information have been made to the same public authority.
• The requests are from the same person.
• The requests relate to the same or similar information.

The Guidance can be found here[1] (see page 12).

Turning now to your request, we can confirm that we hold the requested information which can be found in the attached document (Annex A).

Annex A provides a list of firms, identified by unique Firm Reference Numbers, with three columns distinguishing between firms that have either ‘Debt-counselling’ permissions only (17,819 firms), ‘Entering into regulated credit agreement as Lender (Excluding high-cost short-term credit, bill of sale agreement, and home collected credit agreement)’ permissions only (2,231 firms) and firms that have both permissions (705 firms).