Improving credit regulation and support for debtors

Learning from international experience

The global financial crisis has prompted policy makers and regulators in many countries to introduce additional consumer protections into their regulatory frameworks for credit markets and to take action to support people with debt problems. This has included the development of both short term, temporary, measures (for example in order to prevent mortgage repossessions) as well as reforms designed to ensure more responsible lending practice in the longer term.

There is now an opportunity to draw on this and other international experience to inform UK policy-making and regulation to ensure that the UK avoids known policy errors and bases its future regulation of the credit industry and support for debtors on international best practice.

However, the sharing of international experience is currently very limited. Whilst individual stakeholder groupings (consumers, industry, Government, and regulators) have access to their own international associations and contacts, constructive debate between these groupings rarely occurs. Instead the individual stakeholders often only ‘talk to themselves’ at the international level. Some larger conferences do seek to address this problem, but there is usually insufficient preparatory work involved to provide for a detailed discussion, draw out clear lessons, and support appropriate policy transfer. This project therefore looks to address these problems by bringing a number of viewpoints from the international level into a multi-stakeholder setting which is focused on issues of direct policy concern in the UK.

To take this forwards, the Centre has been commissioned by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to deliver three roundtable events covering:

  • Improving insolvency regimes
     
  • Preventing mortgage repossession
     
  • Regulating credit and store card markets
     

The first roundtable took place on 26th November 2010. The background briefing note prepared by CfRC is available here, and the presentations from this event are now available from the links below.

Professor Iain Ramsay - overview of issues for discussion and Canadian and US insolvency regimes

Michael Knobloch - researching rehabilitation: early evidence from Germany

Albert Luten - debt counselling in the Netherlands

Damon Gibbons - credit scoring issues

Further outputs from the project will be uploaded to this page in early 2011.