UK Car Finance Mis-selling: Reassessing Legal and Regulatory Challenges within Consumer Credit Markets

Abstract This article examines the regulatory dimensions of the UK’s car finance mis-selling scandal, focusing on the structural features of PCP agreements. While current legal interventions emphasise transparency and informed choice regarding commissions, I argue that such measures are poorly equipped to address the embedded inequalities characteristic of intermediated consumer credit markets. PCPs, though marketed as affordable and flexible, routinely give rise to extended credit dependency without securing vehicle ownership for many borrowers. Drawing on Ramsay’s work on credit and distributive justice, the analysis situates PCP finance within broader shifts in welfare provision, income insecurity, and the financialisation of everyday life. It further places recent developments within the longer history of UK financial mis-selling, where commission-based sales models have systematically externalised complexity and risk onto consumers. Rather than treating mis-selling as a failure of commission disclosure, the article invites a more substantive inquiry into how consumer law legitimises forms of market participation that disproportionately burden the financially vulnerable.