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You think that they should be notified before it goes on the register.

Again, that is very clear. Although the provision addresses some of the concerns, do you think that it goes far enough for consumers to be protected if they pay the wrong person? Does it need to go further?

I worry about mischaracterising what was said, but what I heard from the previous panel was that, if a person is in a student block of flats and they are paying money, it is easier for them not to know that the person to whom they owe money has changed. As long as they have the account details to pay it into, it is actually easier for the person not to get a notification every time that the future debt changes hands. Do you think that that is right or are you saying very firmly that it is wrong?

I will ask a couple of questions about assignation. Principally, will there be any challenges if assignation is able to occur by both intimation and registration? Do you have a view on whether both types of claim might continue?

If that happened, a person would know and would instantly be able to change their behaviour or their approach to how they manage that debt within their business.

The bill makes it easier for debts to be transferred, and it makes it easier for that to happen without a person knowing.

Why is there felt to be a need to restate it in the bill?

I have another question to ask before Mike Dailly comes in. It is slightly out of my area of questioning. If consumers or individuals know whom they owe money to, they have an idea of how that debt might be treated and how they will act. It is the same for smaller businesses: if a person thinks that they owe money to a friendly supplier with which they have done business for a number of years and the business that they owe money to changes without the person knowing, they could suddenly find that the debt is handled differently. Does that consumer protection issue arise, or should we not worry about it?

I will push back a bit on that with the same line of questioning that I used in the earlier evidence session. In my constituency work, I see people who are accessing bad lending all the time. It is not that I think that these products are good, but, as you have said, when people are in desperate straits, they are at the end of their options for accessing safer products. It is a case of balancing that moral question—why do we think it is okay to let people access existing products but not this?

The other issue is that we know that there is a problem with unregulated debt: there is a black market in debt where people borrow illegally. For people in that very vulnerable position, is there any advantage in bringing some of that into the open? For example, to take your example of a hire purchase agreement on a car, there are people who cannot access hire purchase agreements because of their credit records or because they are not allowed to borrow at all. This is not my personal view, but, in scrutinising the bill, I feel that I should push back on that and ask for your thoughts on it.

Following on from that, I guess that, if someone is in possession of something, the risk is lower. At the lower end of the market, there is potentially an advantage, where people have credit issues and other things, to the individual or small business being able to hand the item over, in terms of the cost—