Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)

I am afraid that it will come as no surprise to the hon. Member for Wealden to hear that we will not accept the amendment, but that is not because he did not raise many important issues. We looked into the subject at great length in our discussions when developing the proposals and decided to use a similar approach to that taken by the Financial Services Authority regime for mortgages. The regime introduced by new section 86B(1), as set out in clause 9, applies to agreements with monthly payments. While missing only two repayments is appropriate for longer-term agreements with longer repayment intervals, small, short-term loans are different. So simply applying the same timing is not appropriate. For that reason, we have made specific provisions for those short-term agreements.

For agreements with weekly instalments, which are likely to be short-term agreements, missing four repayments will probably to be a significant problem for consumers who rely on that form of credit, for reasons that hon. Members have given.

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