Professor Philip Lane:

I suppose we would keep an open mind and have an evidence-based view on that. As I said earlier, even if there was no interaction, they shared a common set of incentives on the basis that it was expensive for them to fund these trackers. If they were re-reading contracts and determining that certain scenarios were not really catered for in the way those contracts were written, they may have interpreted in light of that ambiguity that the correct rate should be X, or that certain customers should not be returned to trackers after the expiration of a fixed period. They may have been using the legal ambiguity in the understanding that they could stand over such an interpretation, even if customers might have a very different interpretation. The fair-minded person on the street might think it is surely obvious that the natural interpretation is that the tracker rate should be the original rate, as the Deputy suggested earlier, or that it is obvious that the customer has a right, but the legalistic interpretation might be different. Essentially, much of the dispute centres on the gap between what one might be able to base a court case on and what needs to be done to put the customer first.