I really enjoyed that. That was a brilliant array of political parties coming together in the House. I am really glad. I am also glad that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, introduced the amendments in his name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, because they allow us to address the laws of unintended consequences. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, also raised the question.
I come from a long line of people who did not pay credit. I am not likely in my dotage to be grassing up the people I come from. My mother used to go to a doorstep lender, who would direct her to a particular shop, where we paid through the nose over and again in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, until she died in absolute poverty in the late 1970s. I am not going to grass these people up, I assure your Lordships. Actually, I am much more interested in the 15% or 20% of people who are going to find it very difficult to get credit. They are finding it very difficult to get credit now.
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One of the sure signs of social exclusion is the fact that you cannot go to certain shops or buy in certain areas. You cannot even go to Argos. As has been proved by the work of those such as Jesse Jackson in America, as soon as you move into a situation where you can get ordinary credit like other people do—they call it white man’s credit—that is almost like a nudge towards respectability. As soon as you can start saving a bit of money in a credit union, that is a gradual, psychological move. What we are doing is trying to avoid a problem of unintended consequences for a group of people who, at the moment, are in abject poverty and have an incredibly bad ability to get credit, so that they go to payday shysters, sharks and all sorts of people like that. Those people are there already.
There are the 80% or 85% who the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, pointed out that I would refer to as being lifted out—the respectable people. Great—let us give them the thumbs-up but let us do what the FCA said when it came to see us in the House. It said that what we have to do is to help the people who are paying the credit and put our arms around the people who are not, because we do not even know who they are. They are ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving. They come up with all sorts of semi-legal and illegal things to live through the day and the week, the month and the year. If there are some unintended consequences then it will be our duty to look at ways of changing legislation and not simply writing off 80% of people to protect the 20%, when the best protection you can give to those 20% is to find out who they are, get very close to them, embrace them and use them. Those are the people who I work with and where I have come from. There is absolutely no way that I would ever come anywhere near to grassing those people up.
I also make the point that the only way in which your credit actually matters is when you go to Argos or Carphone Warehouse and say, “I would like to have a TV”, or whatever it is they are selling, so that you opt in to share your data with them. If you are the poorest of the poorest and you have a bad credit record, you will not be going there so this is an academic argument. The people who will not want to share their credit record are not doing so and not going to Argos; the people who go to Argos are saying, “I’m going to Argos because, thanks to the rent I’ve been paying, I think I stand a very good chance”. Then they say, “I’m going to try and get myself a bigger flat. I’ll try to move from social housing into ownership, and I want desperately the fact to be known that I have been so diligent and useful to my landlord and to myself, by paying the rent”. I would love it if the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, could withdraw his amendment. Thank you very much.