Consumer Credit and Mobile Phone Contracts continued
I’ve had further clarification from the Office of Fair Trading. Essentially, the position is:—
If a contract (or parts of it) are regulated credit governed by the act, then the conditions imposed by the act are non-negotiable. Failure to comply with the act “renders the agreement unenforceable without an order of the court”. Specifically, the “pre-contract information” (as I’ve talked about previously) must be made readily available, and consumers must be able to take it away with them.
On the “cash alternative when advertising” point:
- If an advertisement to which this Part applies indicates that the advertiser is willing to provide credit under a restricted use credit agreement relating to goods or services to be supplied by any person, but at the time when the advertisement is published that person is not holding himself out as prepared to sell the goods or provide the services (as the case may be) for cash, the advertiser commits an offence
That is, although the advertiser doesn’t have to tell you that there’s a cash alternative, there does have to be one. This also applies if the credit forms only part of the contract.
I don’t honestly know where this leaves things: if credit as part of mobile phone contracts is as commonplace as my interpretation suggests, and yet nobody has ever heard of pre-contract information in this context, either there’s massive amounts of mis-selling going on, or people are just being poorly-informed. In either case, there’s a major problem.
Either that, or I’m wrong about how widespread it is.
