Is it possible to be turned down for a credit card because of no previous credit history?

I have a number of credit cards in my own name with my husband as a joint user. We have had a mortgage but no longer have one and we have no debts, we don't owe anybody any money. Yet when he applied to get a credit card recently he was turned down and I just wonder why? Is it because he had no previous history of owing money that he's paid off for instance?

Owen Roberts, head of Callcredit Check, part of Callcredit responds:

"It is a problem for people who've got no credit history and then suddenly decide they want or need to borrow some money and they can't do it.

There's a term in the industry and it's called a thin file. This is where either you appear on the electoral roll and have no active credit agreements, or you don't even appear on the electoral roll and what it means is if a lender is looking at you, they don't know if you're about to borrow and be a wonderful payer or if you're about to borrow and be a terrible payer, they've got no sense of how you're going to behave. You get caught in this difficult loop and actually the odd way to get out of it is to take very small credit agreements like mobile phone agreements."

Another example is a soldier serving in British Army who is moving around all the time, he's single, he lives in Army accommodation, he doesn't have a mortgage and he has no debt history, he can't get any credit. Is this a problem for service personnel?

Neil Munroe from credit reference agency experian comments:
"It is a problem that we've been trying to work through, not just with service personnel but actually with any other Government officials who work abroad. We've had discussions with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as well because obviously what lenders do these days is they will want to check you are who you say you are to prevent ID theft and fraud and also make the best possible credit assessment and it's all down to accessing information about you at an address.

The problem we have at the moment is the fact that most of these addresses are what they call BFPO addresses which are forces addresses which are very difficult to put into the database in terms of the way they're structured. There is ongoing dialogue with the forces to try and get round this, but some of the advice we have given is to try and get yourself linked to an address back in the UK - whether it's your parents' address or something of that nature so that you can then at least be established as existing."