Share ownership

You asked:

Please would you let me know in writing if you hold the following information:

By country, the value of ownership of UK shares. Please give the annual figures for the last five years available.

We said:

Thank you for your request. We do not hold precisely the information you are asking for. However, we publish two data sets relevant to your request, and one of the sources which we use may help further.

The Share Ownership Survey We publish statistics on ownership of UK listed shares by continental area, as part of the Share Ownership Survey we run every two years.

The latest publication, relating to the end of December 2014, is available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2015-09-02

The previous publication, relating to the end of 2012, is available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2013-09-25

Data for end 2010 fall outside the scope of your request but can be found at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2012-02-28

The analysis for the position as at the end of December 2016 is under preparation and due for publication in August/September 2017. As such, we are exempting this information under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act. The public interest test applies to this exemption; our judgement is that the public interest is best served in completing the analysis and quality assurance of the 2016 statistics prior to their planned publication.

We collect the statistics at this continental level; the Share Ownership Survey does not collect data at the country level. You might also be interested in the split by sector in the same publication, which includes overseas ownership as the "rest of the world" category.

The UK Balance of Payments (Pink Book)

Table 10.1 of the Pink Book publishes a breakdown of investment in the UK by country and includes "portfolio investment" as a category. However, "portfolio investment" includes other UK securities, such as mutual funds shares and bonds.

Due to the layout of table 10.1 only one time period is displayed, please see link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/datasets/10geographicalbreakdownoftheukinternationalinvestmentpositionthepinkbook2016

To view a time series we would recommend using the attached file, 10.1 Table CDIDs.pdf, which contains the four character references (CDID) used to generate the table to identify the series that you are interested in. The CDID can then be used to search the following dataset: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/datasets/pinkbook

Sources for the Pink Book

You may also be interested to know that the International Monetary Fund publishes statistics on equity and investment fund share liabilities by country - see Table 8 at: http://data.imf.org/?sk=B981B4E3-4E58-467E-9B90-9DE0C3367363&sId=1424963554286

Select "United Kingdom" as the country and "Equity and Investment Fund shares" as the Indicator. Please note that these data are used to inform the country distribution of UK portfolio investment liabilities, rather than directly feeding into the compilation of the International Investment Position.