The First Legal Mortgagor: a Consumer Without Adequate Protection?

Lisa Whitehouse ()

Journal of Consumer Policy, 2015, vol. 38, issue 2, 180 pages

Abstract: This article contends that the UK government’s attempt to create a well-functioning consumer credit market will be undermined if it fails to reform the private law framework relating to the first legal mortgage. Such agreements are governed by two distinct regulatory regimes that are founded upon very different conceptions of the mortgagor. The first, the regulation of financial services overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority, derives from public law and is founded upon a conception of the mortgagor as “consumer.” The other is land law, private law regulation implemented by the judiciary and underpinned by a conception of the mortgagor as “landowner.” Evidence suggests that the operation of these two regimes prevents mortgagors from receiving fair and consistent treatment. The current reform of financial services regulation therefore will change only one part of this governance regime and will leave mortgagors heavily reliant upon a regulator that still has to prove itself. What this article argues is that reform of the rules of private law must also be undertaken with the aim of initiating a paradigm shift in the conception of the mortgagor from “landowner” to “consumer.” Cultural shifts of this kind take time, but the hope is that this conceptual transformation will occur in time to deter the predicted rise in mortgage possessions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Mortgage law; Financial services regulation; Consumer protection; Mortgage credit directive (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10603-015-9284-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jcopol:v:38:y:2015:i:2:p:161-180

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/10603/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10603-015-9284-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Policy is currently edited by Hans Micklitz, John Thøgersen, Lucia A. Reisch, Alan Mathios and Christian Twigg-Flesner

More articles in Journal of Consumer Policy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().