Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the value was of student loans that were written off in each of the last five years; and what this was as a proportion of all outstanding student loans.

The table below shows the amount that has been cancelled or written off during each financial year requested, the total amount outstanding at the start of the financial year including interest and loans not yet due for repayment (after adjustments) and the proportion that write offs or cancellations make out of the starting balance.

The reasons for cancelled or written off loans are the following: death of borrower, age of borrower, disability, trivial balances, losses through fraud (including phishing) and other.

Please note that write-offs do not include trivial balance write-offs. Trivial balance write-offs occur if there is a +/- balance on an account of £25 or less and no contact can be established with the borrower (customers can request for this to be reversed). In the context of these figures these borrowers are considered fully repaid and are therefore not included. Cancellations involve the clearance of the remaining debt in line with the terms of the loan, for example when reaching a specific age or becoming permanently disabled. Write-offs for bankruptcy, Individual Voluntary Arrangement or a trust deed, are no longer allowed against Student Loans balances. Any figures arise from retrospective clear up exercises.

These figures have been taken from Student Loans Company’s Student loans in England publication that is updated in June each year. The publication, ‘Student loans in England: 2023 to 2024’ can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/student-loans-in-england-2023-to-2024, and the figures were taken from ‘Table 1A’ here: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2Fmedia%2F6672d0e2f92bc4be25da7e13%2Fslcsp012024.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK.