Fair By Design publishes response to HM Treasury Buy Now Pay Later regulation consultation

Fair By Design has responded to HM Treasury's consultation on the regulation of Buy Now Pay Later, the organisation said on 8 January 2022¹. The response was published on its website and is available as a PDF¹.

The consultation concerns the future regulation of Buy Now Pay Later in the UK. HM Treasury is the body running the consultation; Fair By Design is the respondent¹. The published page does not set out the contents of the response, the number of questions answered, or the specific proposals Fair By Design put forward, and those details have not been reported in the material published alongside the announcement¹.

The date of the response, 4 January 2022, appears in the file name of the linked PDF, while the page carrying the announcement is dated 8 January 2022¹. The page does not state the closing date of the consultation, the date HM Treasury is due to respond, or what happens to responses after submission¹. None of those details have been reported on the page.

Why it matters for households

Buy Now Pay Later lets shoppers spread the cost of a purchase over instalments, usually without interest. How the market is regulated affects what protections borrowers have when something goes wrong, including how complaints are handled and what firms must do before lending. The consultation is part of the process by which new rules for deferred payment credit are decided, and responses from organisations such as Fair By Design feed into that process¹.

Anyone who uses Buy Now Pay Later, or who is considering it, is affected by the outcome of that process rather than by the publication of this response itself. The page does not say which firms or products would be covered by any eventual rules, when any rules would take effect, or how existing arrangements would change¹. Those points have not been reported.

What happens next

The page gives no next steps. It does not state when HM Treasury will publish a response to the consultation, whether draft rules will follow, or on what timetable¹. Fair By Design's response document is available to read in full¹. For how consultations work and how responses are used, see consultations and discussion papers; for the wider framework, see financial regulation in the UK.