Consumer Credit Regulation

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. I will certainly come to that, as there is concern about how we might intervene in the market, but I am confident that we can and should, and that the Government should be considering it. We are discussing, in particular, the mix of a lack of competition and a rising demand for credit, but it is better to consider the people at the heart of the issue. We can all talk about statistics, but many of us will have seen in our surgeries the people who get into such debts. There are women who get into years of debt at high rates because their next-door neighbour is a Provident home seller who tells them week after week that they need to borrow more. A constituent of mine had loans from Provident, BrightHouse and Oakam, as well as a purse full of store cards. She missed a few payments and her interest rates soared as a result. She tried to juggle all of them but did not have enough money, and ended up running up an expensive overdraft that accrued £10 a day in charges. The costs affect not just individuals but our communities as well. A Centre for Responsible Credit survey of the Meadowell estate in 2001 found that more money was going out of the estate on payments to door-to-door lenders than the Government were putting in via regeneration budgets. Given the nature of the market and the evidence that I have put on record, will the Minister admit that many of the practices involved in high-interest, short-term money lending are exploitative and unacceptable, and that the Government should intervene to protect people vulnerable to loan sharking?