Over the past few months, ive had a number of people get in touch with issues over Hire Purchase agreements, and defective goods. All of these cases have a common theme, the goods develop a fault, the consumer complains to the garage who sold the goods, the garage does a repair in some cases or simply ignores the issues and the consumer either rejects the goods to the garage, or eventually goes to the finance company only to be told that they have lost the short term right to reject because they took too long to bring the matter to the finance houses attention.
So where do you stand on a Hire Purchase agreement? Well most think that you buy the car from the garage or dealer, but you don’t. The finance house buys the vehicle, then then sell it to you. Your contract is, in most cases, with the finance house, they are the people responsible for ensuring your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are upheld. If you buy a car on finance such as Hire Purchase, you have 30 days to reject it, rejection means to the finance house not the garage in most circumstances. If you do not reject the goods within those 30 days then you lose the short term right to reject.
Under the Consumer Rights Act the seller has the right to attempt at least one repair once you are outside of the first 30 days, if they do repair the vehicle and it is still faulty then you would have the right to reject the goods potentially, but the rejection would need to be communicated to the correct party.
Most of the problems that arise from what i have seen are consumers not understanding how Hire Purchase works, and making the wrong decision, notifying the wrong company etc. The best advice i could give to any consumer , is if you have an issue with a defective vehicle, dont go it alone, if youre not sure get some advice.
Consumer Credit Litigation, Banking & Debt Collection 