SUMMARY

  The proposed new Consumer Credit Directive is in many respects to be welcomed. The existing Directive does not adequately respond to developments in the range of credit facilities now available, and the proposals add more substance, particularly in relation to the application of the Directive to surety agreements, pre-contractual and contractual information, the statement of the annual percentage rate of charge, the right of withdrawal, provisions as to default and default notices and the introduction of a requirement to regulate intermediaries.

  The principal weakness of the Directive lies in the move from minimum to maximum harmonisation as provided by Article 30. The effect of this is that in relation to agreements within the Directive Member States will be required to ensure that their laws not merely provide the degree of protection given by the Directive but do not confer any greater protection. In countries with relatively undeveloped consumer credit laws this may not be a problem. In the United Kingdom, where the volume of consumer credit is far and way the largest in Europe and which has a highly structured and sophisticated consumer credit industry, experience has shown the need for very detailed regulation to protect the consumer, so that we have a Consumer Credit Act consisting of 193 sections and five Schedules, shortly to be expanded through amendments introduced by the Consumer Credit Bill, which itself has 71 sections and four Schedules, all of these being buttressed by a substantial number of statutory instruments and a determination of the (former) Director General of Fair Trading. To conform to the maximum harmonisation provision would involve a trawl through the vast mass of current legislation and a dismantling of numerous consumer protection provisions that have been thought necessary.

  There is very little cross-border consumer credit and no point in trying to develop a single market in consumer credit. The Commission's central thesis, that differences in national consumer credit laws are the cause of the small volume of cross-border credit, is mere assertion, with no attempt to back it up by empirical evidence and no citations at all from the unpublished studies it says it has commissioned. The move to maximum harmonisation is driven by a dogmatic belief in a single market, regardless of the facts.

  The lack of development in cross-border transactions is due not to differences in national laws but to a host of other reasons which must be obvious even to the most uninformed observer but none of which is even mentioned by the Commission, which surely has some obligation to present a dispassionate analysis. First, there is no need for such a market. The Consumers' Association has estimated that in the UK alone there are some 30,000 financial products. These cover all sectors of the market, and each sector is keenly competitive. The notion that yet more competition would be provided by foreign credit institutions is untenable. Second, a consumer credit transaction is not a one-shot deal; it involves a continuing relationship, detailed documentation and the certainty of default in a percentage of transactions. Why would a consumer from this country wish to negotiate with a creditor in a foreign country, with whose language the consumer may be unfamiliar and whose contracts he or she may be unable to understand? Why would a consumer prefer to deal with a foreign, relatively inaccessible, credit provider instead of with local credit institutions? Why would he or she regard it as an advantage to be deprived of the various advisory services that can assist him or her in case of difficulty or default but which would obviously find it difficult, if not impossible, to give assistance where the creditor is a foreign institution? Third, from the creditor's perspective there are obvious difficulties in breaking into a foreign market: lack of interest on the part of the local consumers, language problems, and the additional expense in having to sue the consumer in the country where he or she resides.

  Other weaknesses in the proposed Directive—the vagueness of some of the provisions, the inflexibility of others—can be cured by appropriate redrafting. The requirement of maximum harmonisation cannot and despite the Commission's assertion to the contrary—an assertion which flies in the face of reality—it will involve a substantial reduction in consumer protection not only in this country but in every other Member State which has protective provisions outside those contained in the Directive. The move to maximum harmonisation for consumer credit, alone of all the numerous consumer protection measures introduced by the European Community, was strongly criticised by Member States and by the European Parliament, which amended the proposal to restore the current concept of minimum harmonisation. Article 30 should therefore be strongly resisted.

I.  INTRODUCTION

The background

  1.  Consumer credit law in the United Kingdom was completely restructured with the enactment of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, which implemented the sweeping changes recommended by the Crowther Committee in 1971.[1] This Act, currently consisting of 193 sections and five Schedules, is buttressed by a large number of statutory instruments which (apart from commencement orders) cover some 10 different aspects of control[2] and by General Notices issued by the Office of Fair Trading relating to licensing and the operation of the consumer credit register. Further measures are being introduced by the Consumer Credit Bill, which itself runs to 71 sections and four Schedules.

  2.  The complexity of UK consumer credit legislation reflects the size of the market and the wide diversity of credit providers and intermediaries. The consumer can readily (often too readily) obtain credit from a bewildering variety of sources, including banks, building societies, mortgage companies, finance houses, insurance companies, credit card issuers, mail order companies, check and voucher traders, friendly societies, industrial and provident societies, credit unions, moneylenders and pawnbrokers. These cater for different sectors of the market and for different risk categories, so that credit ranges from low-risk, low-cost credit provided by banks to high-risk, high cost credit furnished by moneylenders and pawnbrokers. Within most of these groups there is keen competition for the consumer's business. According to the Consumers' Association, there are around 30,000 financial products available in the UK, so that there is no shortage of choice.[3] In addition there are several kinds of ancillary credit business—in the language of the Act, credit brokers (including most retail stores and other retail suppliers), debt-adjusters, debt-counsellors, debt-collectors and credit reference agencies—and a variety of finance, trade and consumer organisations.

EC Directives

  3.  The current Directive in the field of consumer credit law is the Consumer Credit Directive 1987. 38 This has been implemented in the above-mentioned legislation. It embodies the concept of minimum harmonisation, a concept hitherto common to all EC consumer protection measures. In accordance with this concept Member States are required to ensure that their legislation provides the consumer with no less protection than is afforded by the Directive but does not preclude them from giving greater protection.[4]

  4.  It is widely accepted that the present Directive needs updating to reflect developments of the consumer credit market. However, the proposed new consumer credit Directive[5] goes much further, marking a new departure by moving from minimum to maximum harmonisation, so that within the field covered by the Directive the laws of Member States must give neither less nor more protection than the Directive affords. In short, the concept is one of uniformity, not of minimum standards. This approach does not currently feature in any other EC consumer protection measure and has been strongly resisted by Member States and by the European Parliament, which while supportive in many ways has criticised the Commission's proposals and substantially revised the text, both to restore the minimum harmonisation basis and on technical grounds.[6] The Commission has accepted many of the technical amendments and has reduced the scope of its original proposal[7] but has insisted on maintaining the principle of maximum harmonisation. The robustness of the Commission's response no doubt reflects a sensitivity to the unusually acerbic tenor of the comments by the Parliament's rapporteur.[8] But it also conceals significant differences of opinion between two Directorates, the DG for Health and Consumer Affairs (DG Sanco) and DG Markt.

The scope of the proposed new Directive and its impact on UK consumer credit law

  5.  The proposed new Directive, like the existing Directive, does not seek to cover the entire field of consumer credit regulation. It is confined to the following specific aspects:

(1)  Consumer credit agreements except so far as excluded by Article 3.

(2)  Surety agreements, that is, agreements guaranteeing the obligations of the debtor under a consumer credit agreement, except so far as excluded by Article 3.

(3)  The regulation and certain obligations of credit intermediaries.

  Outside these aspects Member States are free to retain their existing legislation and to introduce new legislation.

A general comment on the draft Directive

  6.  If one leaves on one side various drafting defects, the proposed new Directive is a significant improvement on the existing Directive, making provision for various matters which were not previously covered, or covered adequately, but which experience has shown require regulation. Among these are surety agreements, pre-contractual and contractual information, the statement of the annual percentage rate of charge, the right of withdrawal, provisions as to default and default notices and the introduction of a requirement to regulate intermediaries. There is general support for such provisions.

  7.  Appendix 1 lists the most important changes introduced by the new Directive. Many of these are sensible. Some are not. The most important change, and that which is the focus of the present paper, is the move from minimum to maximum harmonisation as provided by Article 30. Other problems with the present text are inflexibility and vagueness. Moreover, while in various respects the concept of maximum harmonisation would reduce the burdens on the consumer credit industry, other aspects of the Directive would increase them to a degree that may be thought unjustified.

II.  MAXIMUM HARMONISATION

The provision for maximum harmonisation

  8.  This requirement is contained in Article 30, which is headed:

"Total harmonisation and imperative nature of the Directive's provisions"

  Paragraph 1 emphasizes this in the following terms:

"Member States may not introduce provisions other than those laid down in this Directive."

The impact of Article 30

  9.  As regards agreements within the scope of the Directive, Article 30, if retained, would involve a trawl through the Consumer Credit Act (in its about to be amended form) and through numerous statutory instruments and the repeal of every item of consumer protection additional to that which the Directive provides. A non-exhaustive list of these is contained in Appendix 2. The scale of the exercise should not be under-estimated. It would involve a detailed examination of the statutory provisions governing exempt agreements, advertising, canvassing, the deemed agency of intermediaries, the form and content of agreements, rights of withdrawal and cancellation, the liability of the creditor for breaches of duty on the part of a linked supplier, the provision of information as to the state of the account and the binding nature of information statements, the variation of agreements, the exclusion of liability for another's misuse of a credit card, the creditor's duty on the issue of new credit tokens, limits on the exercise of remedies on the consumer's death, notices of sums in arrear and default sums, the restrictions on interest, restrictions on the repossession of protected goods and the consequences of unlawful repossession, the prohibition of entry on premises to retake goods, early settlement and rebates for early settlement, the termination of agreements, the provisions as to guarantees and other securities, safeguards for debtors pawning their goods, the reopening of extortionate credit bargains and agreements giving rise to unfair relationships, the regulation of agreements made on the introduction of an unlicensed credit-broker and the restrictions on credit brokerage fees.

  10.  Many of the above statutory provisions find no counterpart in the Directive at all and would have to be repealed or revoked. Others may in some degree be covered by a general formulation, such as the provision in Article 16(1) that creditors "may not take disproportionate measures to recover amounts due to them in the event of non-performance of such agreements", but the scope of the formulation is unclear. One thing is certain: there would be a significant reduction in the protection of the consumer.

The issues raised by the maximum harmonisation approach

  11.  The Commission's insistence on "total harmonisation", contrary to the views of Member States and of the Parliament, raises two basic questions:

(1)  Is there a need for maximum harmonisation?

(2)  Is a "one size fits all" approach appropriate in a European Union consisting of 25 countries in widely differing stages of development?

Is there a need for maximum harmonisation?

  12.  The move to maximum harmonisation in the field of consumer credit is a fundamental change which will be peculiar to this particular field of regulation. It will involve in every Member State a close examination of every statutory provision to ensure that it does not go beyond what the Directive prescribes. It was therefore to be expected that compelling reasons would be advanced for maximum harmonisation outside specific areas where there is general agreement on complete harmonisation, such as the computation of the annual percentage rate of charge. This has not happened. The sole reason advanced by the Commission for total harmonisation is that it is essential in order to promote cross-border consumer credit and thus a single market in credit, an objective which the existing Directive has failed to achieve. The Commission notes that there has been only marginal growth in the market and ascribes this to the differences in national laws resulting from the minimum harmonisation approach.

  13.  A major concern, which I share, is that the Commission has adduced no evidence to support its assertions and that these reflect a purely dogmatic position instead of the balanced and dispassionate assessment which EU citizens are entitled to expect of a responsible Community institution. It is significant that while the Commission's Explanatory Memorandum of 11 September 2002 refers to the series of studies it commissioned on different issues, these are not studies available on its web site and the Explanatory Memorandum does not contain a single quotation from the research to support its statement in its responses of 29 October 2004 to the Parliament's amendments that if the existing minimum harmonisation were to be retained consumer credit would:

"continue to be largely a national and local market, depriving consumers of all the advantages an EU-wide market credit would offer them" [emphasis added].

  Nowhere are the advantages stated. Nowhere is there the slightest analysis to indicate that opening up the consumer credit market would confer the slightest advantage on consumers who, in the UK at any rate, are already overwhelmed by choice. Nowhere is there any indication that a survey of consumers has been conducted to test the validity of the above statement. Moreover, the concept of an EU-wide market, which the Commission does not define, seems curiously limited. The focus appears to be on the extension of credit by a credit institution in one Member State to a consumer in another. For reasons indicated below this is extremely difficult to achieve on a scale that would make it worthwhile to credit providers, even with electronic trading. But there are other ways of creating an internal market in consumer credit, for example, through joint ventures and mergers between credit providers in different Member States, and it is far easier to establish these than to penetrate foreign market directly.

  14.  It is no doubt true that from the viewpoint of credit institutions differences in mandatory rules in this field, as in others, create problems in opening up markets. What is surprising, however, is that the Commission places so much emphasis on differences in laws as the reason for the lack of development of cross-border consumer credit and entirely fails to mention other, much more compelling causes which have nothing to do with the legal rules, including an amplitude of local sources of credit, problems of language, difficulties of access, differences in culture and a perfectly natural desire to do business with institutions in one's own country.

Factors relevant to the consumer

  15.  

(1)  In the UK, as mentioned above, the consumer has a great many possible sources of credit and has no need to look abroad.


(2)  Access to credit in another country is not going to provide any greater degree of competition than the fierce competition that already exists in this country.

(3)  Consumer credit transactions usually involve discussion between the consumer and the prospective creditor and detailed documentation. Why would a UK consumer shop for credit in another country where discussions and documents will be in a foreign language which he or she may be unable either to speak or to read?

100,000 and certain other credit agreements, introducing a simplified set of "light rules" for overdrafts, agreements with credit unions and small loans, removing detailed rules for the registration and regulation of credit intermediaries and withdrawing the proposal to set up national consumer credit databases.

(4)  Consumer credit transactions are not like cash deals; they are typically spread over time and involve detailed documentation and a continuing relationship between consumer and creditor which in the case of running-account credit will often be of indefinite duration. A UK consumer may need to have ready access to his or her credit provider to negotiate additional finance, a longer period of credit, an arrangement to clear arrears, a transfer to another, or a cheaper form of credit, or as a response to the threat of legal proceedings. Is it likely that the consumer will wish to walk into all the problems be involved in ongoing dealings with a credit institution in another country, with all the difficulties of access and language?

(5)  Consumers are much more likely to feel at home with a local credit institution than with a foreign one, even if one discounts problems of language and distance.

(6)  A UK consumer who gets into difficulties has ready access to a range of advisory and support services, including citizens' advice bureaux, money advice centres, and law centres. None of these would find it easy, or even possible, to assist him or her in dealing with a foreign credit provider.

Factors relevant to the credit provider

  16.  Even from the viewpoint of the credit provider, differences in local consumer credit laws are not the principal factor affecting its ability to engage in cross-border credit.

(1)  Market penetration can only be achieved by credit operations on a major scale. Given the powerful disincentives to the consumer to do business with a foreign credit provider, as set out above, the difficulties of establishing a customer base for a scale market are obvious.

(2)  Added to these is the fact that in evaluating the creditworthiness of an applicant for credit a credit institution has access to many local sources of knowledge, credit scoring techniques, and the like, which would have to be created from scratch in a foreign environment.

(3)  The difficulties of access and language differences affect the creditor as well as the debtor.

(4)  Cross-border payments are more difficult to organise and likely to be more expensive.

(5)  If proceedings against the debtor become necessary the creditor will usually have to sue in the debtor's jurisdiction,[9] with whose legal rules and practices the creditor is likely to be unfamiliar and will necessitate its engaging foreign lawyers.

(6)  Differences in tax regimes may be an additional factor causing difficulty.

  17.  Thus it is highly likely that the real reason why there has been little development in a cross-border market for consumer credit is not the existence of differences in national laws but the fact that the consumer has no need of such a market and would confront potentially serious disadvantages in obtaining credit from a foreign credit provider, who would likewise find it difficult to establish a market in credit to foreign consumers. The Commission does not appear to have undertaken (or if it has, it has not identified) any surveys of consumers or credit providers to establish why consumers do not shop for credit abroad or why credit providers do not offer credit to foreign consumers. The statement that it is because of differences in national laws is mere assertion.

Is the "one-size-fits-all" approach sound?

  18.  Laws are not made in the abstract; they are designed to meet the particular needs and concerns of those for whose benefit they are made. In the field of consumer credit there are undoubtedly rules that can be standardised throughout the European Union because they will be relevant regardless of the particular market. These include rules requiring licensing of credit providers and intermediaries and rules governing the components of the total charge for credit, the computation of the APR, the provision of a cooling-off period, the right to accelerate payment and to receive a rebate of charges calculated in a particular way, and the requirement on creditors to serve a default notice giving the consumer a limited opportunity to bring payments up to date before proceedings can be instituted. But other rules are very much dependent on the structure and organisation of the credit industry and the range of credit instruments available. The UK has a large, highly developed, extremely competitive consumer credit market, and has had to develop rules to meet the particular features of that market. It would be absurd to suppose that rules suitable for such a market would necessarily be appropriate in, say, Poland or the Czech Republic or even in France or Germany. The effect of maximum harmonisation is that, while it may increase consumer protection in countries with less developed consumer credit laws, it will reduce it in those whose laws give greater protection in areas covered by the Directive. This is disputed by the Commission. Commissioner David Byrne, who in the debate in Parliament last April stated:

"I wish to reiterate that full harmonisation will not lead to a reduction in the level of consumer protection . . . The Commission is willing to consider excluding areas from the scope of the proposal that would not affect the single market. For these areas Member States can maintain their national provisions."

  In the absence of any specific indication as to what does affect the single market it is not clear on what basis exclusions will be allowed. But whatever exclusions are made it is manifestly untenable to suggest that in the case of Member States whose laws will have to be jettisoned to the extent that they go beyond what is permitted by the Directive there will be no reduction in consumer protection. Paragraph 9 above, together with Appendix II, identifies numerous areas in which such protection will be reduced. One of the most notable is the removal of the liability of the creditor under section 75 of the Act for misrepresentations and breaches of contract by the supplier.

  19.  To be fair to the Commission, some of the rules are expressed in very general terms, allowing a good deal of leeway to Member States. These includes the provisions on rebates for early settlement (Article 16), the remedies against the creditor in a linked transaction (Article 19(2b)) and restrictions on the exercise of remedies (Article 24). Others have been dropped altogether. Moreover, Member States are left entirely free to regulate consumer credit activity outside the three areas listed in paragraph 6. Even so, the maximum harmonisation approach will have a considerable impact on existing UK legislation as mentioned above.

III.  OTHER AREAS OF CONCERN

Inflexibility

  20.  Examples of provisions lacking flexibility and a potential source of difficulty for the UK are those relating to advertisements (Article 4), pre-contractual information (Article 6), Article 11 (right of withdrawal), Article 14(4) (notification of any change of borrowing rate), and 23(1) (surety agreement). The reason why the present Directive is now unsatisfactory, and one of the main reasons given by the Commission for replacing it, is that it is not responsive to new instruments and techniques in the consumer credit market. But the Commission has failed to draw the necessary conclusion from this, that the same thing will happen to the present Directive unless it is sufficiently flexible to allow new developments to be accommodated. Since these will vary widely from State to State it is essential to allow reasonable freedom of Member States to tailor their cc provisions to evolving needs and practices. It is thus surprising to find set rules in the proposed new Directive which in due course will give rise to exactly the same problem. It is essential for consumer credit rules to be sufficiently flexible to respond to new methods of marketing and new financial instruments. Otherwise the rules will stifle innovation.

  21.  Article 4 requires an advertisement to set out standard information in a required order. The standard information is not necessarily appropriate to simple advertisements, such as a willingness to provide credit, and the requirement to set out the details in a specified order is unnecessarily restrictive.

  22.  Article 6 requires the creditor to assess the consumer's creditworthiness on the basis of the information provided by the latter and, where appropriate, on the basis of a consultation of the relevant database. I have considerable sympathy with this provision in that far too much credit is extended with no credit checks at all. But lending institutions may argue that to break into a new market it is simply not feasible to carry out individual checks and that mass offers are unavoidable. My own preference would be to allow this but with the sanction that the court could reduce or even extinguish a debtor's liability if the creditor is not able to show that at the time of the agreement there were no reasonable grounds for believing that the consumer would be able to repay in accordance with the terms of the agreement. That would provide a much clearer criterion than clause 19 of the Consumer Credit Bill, which inserts a new section 140A into the Consumer Credit Act allowing the court extensive powers to order repayment by the creditor or reduce sums payable under the agreement if it determines the relationship between the parties to be unfair. The criteria to be applied by the court are so vague that everything is left to the court—an impossibly uncertain provision and one guaranteed to generate thousands of law suits, leaving it to the Court of Appeal to establish authoritative criteria to produce consistency.

  23.  Article 11 gives a universal right of withdrawal, apart from the exception, meaningless in the UK, relating to "credit agreements concluded through services of an official." This provision, covering credit in the shop or bank as well as doorstep credit, is capable of causing serious problems. It should be left to countries having experience of the types of transaction giving rise to abuse to determine what should be cancellable.

  24.  Article 14(4) requires the consumer to be informed of every change to the borrowing rate. In the case of bank loans this requirement will involve vast expense and is quite unnecessary. Giving details of changes in the national press and in posters at branches, as currently permitted, is perfectly adequate.

  25.  Article 23(1) limits the period of a guarantee to three years and precludes the creditor from taking action against the guarantor unless the consumer has failed to comply with a default notice within three months. Even if the former restriction is justified, the latter is not. It is absurd that a creditor should have its position put at risk by such a long delay, particularly since it does not apply ro proceedings against the consumer, who is the principal debtor. A further adverse effect is to compel the creditor who does not wish to delay proceedings against the consumer to institute two separate actions, one against the consumer and the other some time later against the guarantor.

Vagueness

  26.  Examples of provisions that are too vague to be workable are Articles 6(4) (appropriate type of credit), which should anyway be jettisoned as suggested above, 7(3) ("in good time"), 11(4) ("credit agreements concluded through services of an official"), and 24(1)(a) ("disproportionate measures").

The burden on the industry

  27.  One has to treat with a degree of circumspection claims by the consumer credit industry of the burdens imposed by protective legislation. No one likes to be subject to additional regulation. Nevertheless there are certain provisions of the draft Directive which do appear to impose serious burdens, or constrict legitimate development, even if taken in isolation. Examples are: the provisions on advertisements in Article 4; the duty imposed on the creditor by Article 6(4) to seek to establish the most appropriate type and amount of credit, taking account of the consumer's financial situation and the advantages and disadvantages of the credit proposed, a requirement that is not only too general to be useful but also too burdensome to be workable; and the restrictions on enforcement of a surety agreement in Article 23.   

IV.  CONCLUSIONS

  28.  There is much in the proposed new Directive that is useful and represents a significant improvement on the existing Directive. But the shift to maximum harmonisation will cause serious difficulties of implementation, necessitating a large number of changes to our existing statutory provisions and the elimination of various measures for the protection of the consumer which reflect the particular conditions, practices and areas of concern in the UK consumer credit market. The UK should therefore urge the Commission to adopt the approach of the Parliament by retaining the concept of minimum standards except in relation to very specific matters on which there is general agreement for total harmonisation, such as the computation of the annual percentage rate of charge.

  29.  Opportunity should also be taken to introduce flexibility into the provisions identified in paragraph 20 and to clarify Articles 7(3), 11(4) and 24(1)(a).

3 June 2006

  (1)  The principle of maximum harmonisation.

  (2)  A longer list of defined terms, primarily because of new provisions governing surety agreements, linked credit agreements and intermediaries.

  (3)  The extension of the Directive to cover surety agreements, ie guarantees of the consumer's obligations.

  (4)  The introduction of a requirement to state a "borrowing rate", ie a periodic rate, in addition to the annual percentage rate of charge (APR).

  (5)  The replacement of a requirement of writing by the more flexible requirement of a durable medium, which would include storable data transmitted by computer.

  (6)  An expansion of the list of credit agreements excluded from the scope of the Directive.

  (7)  A requirement to include in advertisements a number of items of "standard information" in addition to the APR.

  (8)  A requirement of responsible lending, including assessment of the consumer's creditworthiness on the basis of information provided by the consumer and, where appropriate, on the basis of a consultation of the relevant database.

  (9)  A requirement to provide detailed pre-contractual information, including the borrowing rate, with special rules in relation to overdrafts and to agreements that would otherwise be outside the Directive.

  (10)  A requirement, in the case of cross-border credit, to ensure access to creditors from other Member States on a non-discriminatory basis.

  (11)  A substantial expansion in the list of items of information to be included in credit agreements.

  (12)  The introduction of a right of withdrawal from the agreement within a specified time, and consequent cessation of liability under a linked transaction.

  (13)  A refinement of the APR formula and an increase in the number of worked examples to cover running-account credit.

  (14)  A ban on the use of bills of exchange, promissory notes and cheques as a guarantee of payment.

  (15)  The imposition of a duty to provide regular information to the consumer of his situation on a current account or debit account.

  (16)  The introduction of the consumer's right to terminate an open-end credit agreement on three months' notice.

  (17)  Provision as to defaults and default notices, including a requirement to prohibit creditors from taking disproportionate measures to recover amounts due to them on non-performance of credit and surety agreements.

  (18)  The provision of information to the consumer about exceeding his credit limit.

  (19)  The introduction of a requirement to regulate intermediaries and to impose conditions on their right to receive fees.

Exempt agreements

  Consumer Credit Act 1974, ss 16, 16A* and 165B*

  Consumer Credit (Exempt Agreements) Order 1989

Advertisements

  Consumer Credit Act, s 43

  Consumer Credit (Advertisements) Regulations 1989

  Consumer Credit (Exempted Advertisements) Order 1985

Canvassing

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 48, 49

Deemed agency of intermediaries

  Consumer Credit Act, s 56

Form and contents of agreements

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 62-64, 74

  Consumer Credit (Agreements) Regulations 1983

  General Notice No. 34

Rights of withdrawal and cancellation

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 58, 67-73

  Consumer Credit (Cancellation Notices and Copies of Documents) Regulations 1983

  Consumer Credit (Repayment of Credit on Cancellation) Regulations 1983

Liability of creditor for breaches by linked supplier

  Consumer Credit Act, s 75

Information as to the state of the account

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 77, 77A*, 78, 97, 107-109

  Consumer Credit (Running-Account Credit Information) Regulations 1983

  Consumer Credit (Prescribed Periods for Giving Information) Regulations 1983

Variation of agreements

  Consumer Credit Act, s 82

  Consumer Credit (Notice of Variation of Agreements) Regulations 1977

Exclusion of liability for misuse of credit card

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 83, 84

Creditor's duty on issue of new credit tokens

  Consumer Credit Act, s 85

Limit of exercise of remedies on consumer's death

  Consumer Credit Act, s 86

Notices of default, sums in arrear and default sums

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 86A,* 86B*, 86C*, 86D,* 86E* 87-89

  Consumer Credit (Enforcement, Default and Termination Notices) Regulations 1984

Restrictions on interest

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 86F*, 93

Restrictions on the repossession of protected goods

  Consumer Credit Act, s 90

Prohibition of entry on land to recover goods

  Consumer Credit Act, s 92

Early settlement and rebates

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 94-96

  Consumer Credit (Rebate on Early Settlement) Regulations 1983

Termination of agreements

  Consumer Credit Act, 98-100

  Consumer Credit (Enforcement, Default and Termination Notices) Regulations 1983

Guarantees and other securities

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 105-113

  Consumer Credit (Guarantees and Indemnities) Regulations 1983

Safeguards for debtors pawning goods

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 114-121

  Consumer Credit (Pawn Receipts) Regulations 1983

  Consumer Credit (Loss of Pawn Receipt) Regulations 1983

  Consumer Credit (Realisation of Pawn) Regulations 1983

Reopening of extortionate credit bargains and agreements giving rise to unfair relationships

  Consumer Credit Act, ss 137-140, 14A*-140D*

Regulated agreements made on the introduction of an unlicensed credit-broker

  Consumer Credit Act, s 149

Restrictions on credit-brokerage fees

  Consumer Credit Act, s 155

  *Clauses of the Consumer Credit Bill

2   For details, see Goode: Consumer Credit Law and Practice, vol 3, pp III/xi-III/xv/ Back

3   Consumers' Association position (October 2002) on proposals for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the harmonisation of laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States concerning credit for consumers. Back

4   87/102/EEC, as amended 90/88/EEC and 98/7/EEC. Back

5   Not published by the Commission except in the form of comments on the amendments by the Parliament (COM(2004)747 final, 28 October 2004) but available in a helpful unofficial text produced by the Department of Trade and Industry as Annex I to its consultation paper. Back

6   Second Report, Final A5-0224/2004, 2 April 2004. Back

7   In particular, by excluding loans above Back

8   Who reported that the text needed to be completely rewritten by the Parliament. Back

9   1980 Rome Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations, art 5. Back