Re: Helping consumers?
Unfortunately, if you ever need a loan (including insurance premiums paid monthly rather than annually), credit card or mortgage, the lender will go to one of those three credit reference agencies to get an idea of your credit worthiness. Given the data they hoover up includes utility bill payments (energy, water, phone/broadband) and bank overdraft usage, it's possible even they ask the agencies for your credit score before allowing you to use their products.
And if you want to examine the data they hold on you, you either have to give them money or sign up to a service such as Clearscore, which instead tries to sell you financial services (poorly, given their emails just try to sell you an identity protection service [hahaha] and the app is nice enough to hide all the offers on a separate tab). Amusingly, my only "off-track insight" is that I don't have a credit card.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
