We raised this in some detail in the paper that we handed to the committee in mid-November.
We are very concerned about these trends where instruments that traditionally consumers understood.... Things you buy on credit cards, like less frequent purchases, larger sums and stuff you save up for to some extent as well.... What's happening now is that instruments that were designed for that kind of market are now being used to buy groceries.
Traditionally, if people used an electronic transfer for groceries, they'd use a debit card. It would come out of their bank right away and there was no potential for accumulating a debt. Now we're moving into a situation where we have a raft of instruments that consumers are using for very different reasons than they did 15 years ago.
That's why we say it's very important at this stage of the game to have a reassessment of the protection regimes we have in place and, to some extent, a re-education of consumers about the debt implications they fall foul of when they use things like credit cards for everyday expenditures and get pushed.
We've seen it in the last couple of years with the pandemic. The big impact has been on very stretched household budgets for essential things like food, energy, shelter costs and so forth. The temptation, because it's now become ubiquitous, is to use credit instruments like cards, which shift those daily expenditures into what would be effectively debt accumulation.
It's very worrying. I think that's one of the things we have to face up to now. We're in a different world than we were even five years ago.