Transparency data

Data Management Approach and Confidentiality Policy

Updated 1 July 2026

In order to serve the public good, the Insolvency Service ensures the information and data used to produce official statistics is ethically collected, accessed, used and shared.

Insolvency Service statistics make use of existing administrative sources rather than separately collecting data for statistical purposes. For example, information on Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) such as name, date of birth and address is provided to the Insolvency Service from insolvency practitioners for the administration of the Individual Insolvency Register.

Only data that is necessary to produce official statistics is retrieved from these administrative sources, analysed and stored. All data is used within legal requirements such as the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act (2018) and in line with the Insolvency Service’s Personal Information Charter.

In addition, the Insolvency Service data are enriched with data from other government departments such as population figures and Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) records from Office for National Statistics (ONS), and information on companies from the Companies House Register. We have agreements with Companies House and ONS on the handling and use of their data. These agreements allow use for statistical purposes only.

Record-level data is provided only when the information is already public. For example, a list of companies that entered insolvency is included in our monthly company insolvencies statistics. This information is available from the Companies House Register, but we provide it in a more easily accessible format.

We also publish volumes of individual insolvencies without suppressing small numbers as may be required to ensure anonymity, for example in ward-level data in our Individual Insolvencies by Location, Age and Gender statistics. This is because the source used for the statistics is the same as that used for the Individual Insolvency Register, which is available to the public and includes personally identifiable data.

How we ensure confidentiality

To ensure confidentiality, we:

• keep confidential information secure on access-controlled systems that is only accessible to analysts working on those systems and who understand their responsibilities under data protection laws.
• provide pre-release only to a small number of people 24 hours before publication to enable them to prepare responses to questions that may arise from the release. Access is strictly limited and a list of postholders with this access is provided alongside each publication. These pre-release procedures ensure that those protecting statistical outputs are protected from any political pressures that may influence the production or presentation of the statistics.
• apply disclosure control (for example, rounding) to numbers wherever it is needed to prevent identification of individuals, or the release of private information. For example, in our Individual Insolvency Statistics, numbers of breathing spaces by money advisor are rounded to the nearest 10 to avoid the possibility of identification of individuals where money advisor groups registered a small number of cases. Similar disclosure control is applied to numbers in the Business Insolvency Demography publication, which is based on confidential data on businesses on the IDBR.