Ms Derville Rowland:

I will be perfectly straightforward with the Deputy. I do not necessarily think treating these customers as a vulnerable customer is going to help them necessarily get to where they need to get to. I am certainly very sympathetic, in that any of us could be vulnerable at different points of our life, such as following a bereavement or due to stress or health issues, and some of that could be permanent or temporary. It is not that I am against treating these customers as vulnerable customers and offering them additional supports but I think something else is going on. This is a special category of cases outside of everybody's control. It is so exceptional that a national support scheme has been put in place, recognising the injury to these people and their homes by pyrite and-or mica. I think there are about 7,500 family homes affected and a national scheme has been put in place. That, of itself, is exceptional recognition of the situation in which people find themselves. It is easy to say, by definition, these customers are very vulnerable because there is a national scheme of support.

Having listened to the team who met some of the representatives of the scheme, a myriad of issues need to be dealt with together to give people consistency of approach and answers. A consistent solution is needed to make the scheme work for them and flow. Many people will have mortgages with different institutions with slightly different terms and conditions, and there needs to be an ability for each institution to see and interpret them differently, even sympathetically. The same is needed with insurance contracts and maybe some of the other things. It is a bit of cheeky of me to say so but I think what people need is one place to go and ask, "Can we get a line on the mortgage interpretation?" That would standardise the process for everybody and people would not have to go to different places in terms of insurance and lending and the approach. That would mean people could see how the scheme worked, look at the gaps where it was not working so well and get one set of solutions to support the effectiveness of the scheme and not hear different things from different institutional providers.