As this field of commercial endeavour took off in the 1960s it rapidly became obvious that it would be necessary to strictly control lending to consumers by statute. The Consumer Credit Act - dated 1974 but amended many times - was an attempt to level the playing field so that the consumer - who had perhaps borrowed only a few thousand pounds - could deal with a lender who might be lending hundreds of millions of pounds overall.
Another problem was the three-way nature of most such agreements - the seller, the buyer, and the lender. The relationship of the consumer with two different commercial organisations - one might be Barclays; the other might be Ford - makes the whole transaction far more complicated.
