FOI release

FOI 114: Director disqualifications

Updated 15 February 2021

Our ref: FOI20/21-114

Date: 11 November 2020

Re: Freedom of Information Act 2000

Thank you for your email of 21 October in which you requested from the Insolvency Service:

“Under the Freedom of Information Act, …, I would like to know:

The number of director disqualifications broken down as per type of allegation

Please could you provide this data, broken down by quarter, for the eight quarters up until September 30 2020.”

Your request has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

I can confirm that the Insolvency Service holds the information that you have requested. However, some of the information you have requested is exempt from disclosure under section 22(1) of the act and this information is therefore refused.

Table 1 at Annex A of this letter provides a quarterly summary of director disqualification orders and undertakings in Great Britain by allegation type, during the six quarters covering the period Q4 2018 to Q1 2020. Information held by the Insolvency Service covering the latter two periods Q2 2020 and Q3 2020 are refused under Section 22(1) of the act.

Section 22(1) Information is exempt information if:

(a) The information is held by the public authority with a view to its publication, by the authority or any other person, at some future date (whether determined or not),

(b) The information was already held with a view to such publication at the time when the request for information was made, and

(c) It is reasonable in all the circumstances that the information should be withheld from disclosure until the date referred to in paragraph (a)

Data held by the Insolvency Service for the financial year 2020/21 to date (i.e. data covering Q2 and Q3 of 2020) will be used to inform the annual Enforcement Outcome Official Statistics, to be published (provisionally) in April 2021. This information will be published on the Gov.UK website:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/insolvency-service-enforcement-outcomes

In applying this exemption, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

While meeting the legal requirements of the FOIA, the Insolvency Service is also obliged under section 13 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 to continue to comply with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, and specifically, the Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008. The latter requires the producers of official statistics to ensure that no indication of the substance of a statistical report is made public, or given to the media or any other party not recorded as eligible for access prior to publication.

If you are not satisfied with the response we have provided you and would like us to reconsider our decision by way of an internal review (IR), please contact our Information Rights Team at [email protected] or by post at:

Information Rights Team

The Insolvency Service
3rd Floor
Cannon House
18 Priory Queensway
Birmingham
B4 6FD
United Kingdom

You also have the right to contact the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) if you wish for them to investigate any complaint you may have in regards to our handling of your request. However, please note that the ICO is likely to expect an IR to have been completed in the first instance.

Kind regards

Kate Palmer

Head of Statistics

Insolvency Service

[email protected]

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Official receivers and the Adjudicator are Data Controllers in respect of personal data processed by the Insolvency Service. For the details about how personal data is processed by the agency, please see the full Insolvency Service Personal Information Charter here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/insolvency-service/about/personal-information-charter