Mentally ill woman sold several loans

One of Britain’s largest doorstep lenders gave thousands of pounds of loans to a schizophrenic woman despite knowing she was “not all there”, a Panorama investigation claims today.

The BBC current affairs programme went undercover at Provident Financial, a FTSE 250 company with 1.8 million customers, and says it found cases of lending that appeared to breach Office for Fair Trading (OFT) 
industry guidelines.

Panorama – Undercover: Debt on the Doorstep, which is broadcast tonight, interviewed the mother of the unnamed woman, who requires constant care for her condition but was allegedly given loans over several years.

“You can talk to [her] and anyone in their right mind would know she’s got an illness,” her mother told the programme.

“She’s so vulnerable she just agrees to them [the loans]. I want it all to stop.”

In a statement the company said: “Provident has strict policies in place to prevent loans being advanced to anyone it believes does not have the mental capacity to understand the terms of the loan they are taking out, whilst at the same time ensuring that it does not discriminate against anyone.”