The terms and conditions governing most financial transactions affect us all in both our business and our personal lives.
A modern, properly transparent and regulated personal property security law, or transactional law, is central to the functioning of an economy, affecting everyone from small businesses, borrowers and finance providers of all types, creditors and debtors, lawyers, insolvency practitioners and lawyers.
According to Professor Louise Gullifer, executive director of the Secured Transaction Law Reform Project, a wide-ranging project investigating English transaction law, the current situation has serious flaws, some of which follow:
It is a complex mixture of case law and a number of statutes, which may guarantee lawyers an income but is opaque to both them and the non-experts it might be affecting.
Current law on fixed and floating charges can affect the cost of credit and the willingness of financial institutions to lend especially to unincorporated small businesses, forcing them into structuring themselves in forms that may not be appropriate to their needs in order to access secured finance.
In the case of insolvency, the lack of an up to date, clear and transparent registration system for secured assets can complicate matters for both creditors and debtors.
Business rescue is often hampered by the emergence of security that is not registered with Companies House or on the Land Register. This relates to a lack of transparency about ownership or control of specific pledge assets that distorts most balance sheets such that corporate solvency and viability is often not clear.
This is a wide-ranging and comprehensive project looking into this and the organisers are inviting as many people as possible to get involved, make comments, or raise concerns. There’s more on the secured transactions law reform project website: http://securedtransactionslawreformproject.org/
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