Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003, s 57; Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003, s 55(1B)
In some cases when you’ve already missed a payment, the lender doesn’t have to consider any hardship request you make. This applies if:
you’ve been behind on your payments for two months or more, or
four times in a row you’ve failed to make your payments on time, or
you’re behind two weeks or more after getting a repossession warning notice (see “Repossession” in this chapter).
However, even in those cases the lender must consider your hardship request if you’ve now fixed the problem.
The lender also doesn’t have to consider your request if you could reasonably have been expected to foresee, when you made the contract, that the hardship would prevent you making your payments.
There’s also a restriction on how often you can make hardship requests on the same grounds. If you’ve already made a hardship request to the lender, you can’t make another one within the next four months unless it’s for a different reason.