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Debt Advice and Debt Management

Obviously credit can be affordable without a usury cap. It depends on the price that is set. I am increasingly of the view that there probably is room for some form of cap, but that it should not be a blunt and general cap that would have all sorts of unintended consequences. As I said a moment ago, I do not believe that there would be any appetite in this country for an enormous central database storing credit transactions involving every conceivable type of provider and every single citizen of the United Kingdom so that loan applications could be compared with earlier ones. Affordability is now a principle in the OFT guidelines. There is an argument that lenders should have a general duty of care to make reasonable efforts to ensure that the loans they provide are affordable to the consumer, and also that the loan does, indeed, get paid down over time.