On 20 March 2020, BrightHouse went into administration. BrightHouse sold electrical appliances, furniture, computers and mobiles on hire purchase. Its customers made weekly payments, sometimes described as "rent-to-own". Coronavirus has meant that its 240 shops have had to shut and many customers are likely to be asking for payment holidays as their income has fallen and they can't manage … [Read more...]
Debt news and policy
Debt Camel articles on what's changing and what ought to change in the world of personal debt in Britain.
If you are interested in a specific area, look at: High cost credit news & policy and Insolvency news & policy.
And for my weekly round-ups of debt and poverty news items, see Weekly News Summaries.
BrightHouse “close to collapse” because of increasing affordability complaints
UPDATE - BrightHouse went into administration on 20 March 2020. See BrightHouse enters administration – how does this affect customers? for details. On 29 February 2020, Sky News reported "Rent-to-own giant BrightHouse on brink of collapse". This said: there has been a "surge" of complaints which are currently costing BrightHouse more than £1million a month; management is worried … [Read more...]
Lloyds/Halifax overdraft fees – down, then up, now down (mostly)
From 2017 to 2020 people with the Lloyds group of banks - Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland -have seen their overdraft charges change dramatically several times. This article charts the extraordinary rollercoaster of these fees. Overdraft charges before 2017 People were charged multiple fees on a Lloyds overdraft: a £6 a month for having an arranged overdraft; a £10 a … [Read more...]
Will the Money Shop really pay 80% of refunds? No!
UPDATES In August 2019 the Money Shop announced a Scheme it expected would pay c 80p in the £ to customers of the Money Shop, Payday UK and Payday Express who are owed compensation for unaffordable loans. I said pigs might fly - see the article below. And I think other people such as the FCA and the Ombudsman also express some scepticism... A month late, in September 2019, a revised version … [Read more...]
90% of guarantor loan cases won at Financial Ombusdman
The Financial Ombudsman (FOS) complaint statistics for Oct-Dec 2019 have just been published, see Product Complaints Data. For guarantor loans, FOS decided in favour of the consumer in 90% of cases: this is even higher than the 83% that were won in April-Jun 2019. these figures are a dramatic increase from the uphold rate of only 32% for the 2018 financial year. This … [Read more...]
Wonga victims will only get 4.3p in the pound
On 28th January 2020, the Wonga administrators announced that they will be paying all unsecured creditors 4.3% of their agreed Claim. They stated: This is a first and final dividend totaling £23,090,071.32, representing 4.3p in £ on agreed creditor claims of £535,636,017.75. No further dividends are expected to be paid to the Company’s creditors. Most of the unsecured creditors are the c. … [Read more...]
New “simpler” overdraft charges in 2020 are higher for 8 million people
In June 2019, the bank regulator, the FCA, announced its new rules about overdraft charges. It called these: the biggest shake-up to the overdraft market for a generation. Banks have to change their overdraft charging before April 2020. On 22nd January the last of the banks announced how they were changing their rates. And the FCA has now admitted that about 8 million people will be paying … [Read more...]
Debt Advice – 2019 did not go well – what will happen in 2020?
Many annual reviews say the year has gone by so fast. But it seems like a very long while since I wrote my review of Debt Advice in 2018. 2019 has been very difficult for debt advice. There have been few bright spots (apart from affordability complaints), a lot of delays to policy decisions being taken and an ever-worsening benefits environment for our clients. 2019 - what happened & … [Read more...]
QuickQuid – the Casheuronet administrators’ Proposals & Voting
The Administrators for Casheuronet LLC (CEU) have published their Proposals for how the administration should be handled. CEU went into administration on 25 October 2019. CEU is better known by its brand names: QuickQuid, Pounds To Pocket and Onstride, all major UK payday lenders. If you have a complaint against one of these payday lenders you may have been sent a copy of these Proposals and … [Read more...]
More payday lenders go under – was anything learned from Wonga?
In the last six weeks, Britain's largest payday lender, QuickQuid, went into administration followed by three smaller lenders: 247 Moneybox, PiggyBank and Swift Sterling. Have the lessons from Wonga's collapse last year been leaned? And how can regulators and debt advisers do better in future to protect borrowers, not just of payday loans but other sorts of high cost credit as well? My 6 … [Read more...]
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