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Electoral Administration Bill

Perhaps I may ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, to consider one issue. I can understand that where the borrower has a right under the agreement to have the interest rolled up, one can regard that—to start with, at any rate—as one of the terms of the original loan agreement. On the other hand, if there is no such right and the lender and borrower agree a couple of years later that some interest should be capitalised, I would have thought that that is plainly a new agreement. There is a possible intermediate situation: where the borrower has a right to have the interest capitalised but the lender also has a right to call in the loan on, let us say, one month’s notice. In that case, it could certainly well be argued, and probably correctly, that by not calling in the loan itself, but allowing it to be carried over and the interest to continue to be rolled up, the lender was in fact extending additional credit to the borrower at that date, simply by not calling in the loan.