Consumer Credit Bill

moved Amendment No. 18:"After Clause 7, insert the following new clause—" ““CALCULATION OF INTEREST (1)   Section 78 of the 1974 Act (duty to give information to debtor under running-account credit agreement) is amended as follows. (2)   After subsection (1)(c) there is inserted— ““(d)   the calculation by the creditors of any interest accumulated to be paid by the debtor.”” (3)   In subsection (3) after ““(1)”” there is inserted ““(a), (b) and (c)””.”” The noble Lord said: Amendment No. 18 is grouped with Amendment No. 20, standing in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, and the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley. In different ways, we are both trying to address the same issue, which is how to calculate interest in an agreement. There will be common ground, certainly between us, that in very many credit agreements the calculation of interest is unsatisfactory, opaque and not consistent with the way in which interest is calculated by other lenders. There are many ways in which we can approach the amendment. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that we are the only western democratic country that puts the stress on the APR—annual percentage rate. I am not sure that other countries attempt to calculate annual percentage rate. I may be wrong, but certainly a lot of them do not. The probable reason for that is that it is often very difficult to calculate and is calculated inconsistently by different lenders. This is a probing amendment to seek how far the Government are prepared to go to better define the calculation of interest for the purpose of these agreements. I beg to move.