‘Too Much of a Good Thing’

By the 1980s, the Labour and Conservative parties were more receptive to radical ideas that had great implications for the consumer credit market. Labour’s left pursued plans to nationalize financial institutions. The Conservatives embraced monetarism as a solution to Britain’s high levels of inflation. While ideology played a role, it does not provide sufficient explanation for the liberalization that followed. Hire purchase terms controls were eventually abolished in 1982, alongside the more generalized attempts to restrict personal lending, but the persistent search for a more effective means to the same end continued for longer than might have been supposed. Liberalization, in turn, led to a boom in the use of consumer credit in the 1980s, producing renewed Labour demands for its restraint. The debate that followed is revealing of how new technological and international influences made devising a workable system of credit control ever more difficult.