SIR – Debt management firms offer to pay their clients’ mortgage debt and reschedule the payments.

Some have failed to pay their clients’ creditors, kept client money for themselves and then gone out of business, the whereabouts of clients’ money remaining unknown.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is quoted as saying that this practice is “totally unacceptable”.

What do they do about it?

Where they see evidence of this malpractice, they will remove a company’s consumer credit licence!

Here is yet another piece of New Labour negligence.

Not only is this practice criminal by any standard of decency.

Those who have offered false hopes to families struggling to manage their debt, and then effectively stolen their money, are able to escape any sanction apart from having their consumer credit licence revoked.

To the average decent person, such people should be behind bars.

However, nothing was done about them or loan sharks for that matter during 13 years of New Labour.

How ironic it would be if, as the OFT has indicated, that it will be under a Toryled government that financial services crooks are reined in.

PETER NIELSEN
Worcester