Standards | LG Inform Plus

Help text: This index is the availability of physical sources of good and bad credit (such as banks or loan shops on the high street).

Credit environment - What type of credit does the local high street offer? This strand classes bank branches, free cash points and credit unions as positive factors and payday lenders as negative factors.

Demos an independent, educational charity created their annual Good Credit Index to offer a geographic look at access to affordable credit around the UK, utilising both private and public sector administrative and geospatial data. These include publicly available national statistics, publicly published data from financial inclusion charities, geospatial data scraped from Open Street Map and credit provider websites, and private data from credit reference agency Experian, credit union trade organisation ABCUL, and the cash machine network LINK. None of the data sets offered information about individuals. The index is calculated at the local authority level. Time lag variations will exist and in each instance Demos has used the most recent data available. The sources used to calculate the index were weighted based on an assessment of their relative importance, utilising findings from annual polling since 2019, to weight the credit environment and using regressions against suitable proxies for the credit scores and credit need. The Index intends to give a sense of the overall financial health of an area, so Demos advises against reading too much into a local authority being placed 133rd versus 134th, and instead focus on the broad patterns and trends that appear in geographic distribution and the similarities and differences across overall higher and lower scoring local authorities.

For further details please go to: www.demos.co.uk/project/the-good-credit-index-2022