Mr. Brendan Whelan:

I will take that question. I am conscious that my video may not working, but there is nothing I can do on this side because I do have it switched on. I will keep going anyway. From informal discussions and soundings we have taken, we understand that during the periods of lockdown the moneylenders have contacted their customers. As Ms Corcoran said earlier, the majority of those people concerned have bank accounts. They have made their payments to the agents by quoting their bank account numbers, and those agents would then have a process where they could raise a debit on the bank accounts concerned. We have also heard that meetings are taking place in locations other than homes, and in other cases we presume that the money owed may be being stored up until such time as the lockdown ends.

What is probably even more relevant in this regard, though, is the business of Provident Financial Group, PFG, in the UK. It is a public limited company, PLC, listed on the FTSE100. In its third quarter trading statement, the company reported that the proportion of collections in respect of home credit via remote methods was over 80%. Back in 2019, Provident had announced that it was moving from manual collection of repayments via agents knocking on doors to electronic payments instead. In a year or two, therefore, it looks like that company has managed to get 80% of its customers to pay electronically. Provident also reported that the benefit to the company from that changeover was a reduction in costs of €13 million. The concept of moving to electronic operations and managing the credit risks that arise from not knocking on doors therefore looks to be something that the moneylenders have done successfully in the UK, and I see no reason it cannot be done here.