National Insurance number format
Dear Department for Work and Pensions,
I understand that the National Insurance Number (NINO) is in the
format "AA NN NN NN A", where A represents a letter and N a number
from 0–9.
Could you please provide the following information under the
Freedom of Information Act:
1. A list of the two-letter combinations ever used as the first two
characters of NINOs so far issued to people in the UK.
2. A list of the two-letter combinations ever used as the first two
characters of NINOs used for administrative or other special
reasons (e.g. "TN", "MW", "PP").
3. A list of the two-letter combinations scheduled to be used as
the first two characters of future NINOs for people in the UK.
4. A list of the two-letter combinations scheduled to be used as
the first two characters of future NINOs for administrative or
other special reasons.
5. A list of letters ever used as the final (9th) character of
NINOs.
6. The reasons why "GB", "BG", "NK", "KN", "NT", and "ZZ" cannot be
used as the first two characters of a NINO.
7. The reasons why "F", "M", and "P" were used as the final (9th)
character of NINOs.
Could you also answer the following questions:
1. Is it true that the numbers (the 3rd–8th characters) of NINOs
are allocated consecutively from "000000" to "999999"? (And if not,
how are they allocated? And from what starting number does the
allocation begin? And at which number does it end?)
2. Do any of the characters of NINOs act as a "check digit" by
which the validity of the NINO can be verified (using the otherz
constituent characters of the NINO)?
Yours faithfully,
Mr J. Hilton
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Dear Mr Hilton
Please find attached our response to your recent Freedom of Information
request.
Yours sincerely
DWP Central Freedom of Information Team
Ref. VTR 4543
Dear Sir / Madam,
Thank you for your detailed response. I would just like to clarify a couple of things.
You gave a list of all the two-letter prefixes which are currently used or scheduled to be used, but I have no way of knowing which have actually been used and which haven't. Could you provide a list of the prefixes which are scheduled to be used, but have not yet actually been used to issue new NINo's?
Although you didn't specifically answer question 5 (about the single-letter suffixes used) it's clear from one of the documents you have referenced (and your reply itself) that only A, B, C, D are valid suffixes (although F, M and P were used for temporary numbers). Could you confirm that this is correct?
And could you tell me how the single-letter suffix is actually allocated when creating a new NINo? E.g. is it random, or is there some method for working it out? (I realise that this wasn't part of my original request, but it does save me having to make another one, and it would be much appreciated.)
Yours faithfully,
Jeremy Hilton
Dear Mr Hilton
Please find attached our response to your review request.
DWP Freedom of Information Team.
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