Date / time
18/03/2016
1:00 pm
Maria Gawne is an Assistant Legal Director in the Consumer lawyers’ team at the CMA. She is a qualified barrister and after working at the Bar in general practice for several years she has worked on consumer matters at the CMA and the Office of Fair Trading before that for over 12 years in total. During that time she has worked on many regulatory and policy matters relating to unfair terms including the first UK higher courts decision on unfair terms, the 2001 House of Lords judgment in Director General of Fair Trading v First National Bank. Recently she has worked with policy and legal colleagues on the OFT and CMA’s contributions to BIS on its enactment of part 1 of the Consumer Rights Act (supply of goods and services and blacklisted exclusion clauses) and BIS’s implementation of the Consumer Rights Directive, and was a member of the legal team contributing on parts of the recently published CMA guidance on Unfair Contract Terms.
Andrew Hadley is a Policy Advisor at the CMA, and is currently the Policy Lead on Unfair Contract Terms. His academic background is in medieval history and philosophy. He has worked at the CMA and its predecessor OFT since 2001, largely on the UK implementation, enforcement and Guidance of European Consumer Protection Directives including the UCPD and the UTD. He led the UK and CMA’s involvement in the second and third years of a European Unfair Terms Strategy project between enforcement agencies in 2014-15. In 2015 he was the project manager and editor of the CMA’s revised suite of Guidance on Unfair Contract Terms and has since been working on various related compliance, enforcement and policy projects.
Andrew and Maria will address:
• An overview of the law on unfair contract terms as updated by the Consumer Rights Act 2015
• Analysis of the key legal concepts
• Some thoughts about the implications of recent ECJ cases and changes introduced by the Consumer Rights Act
• Relationship with other new law: Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and
• Additional Charges) Regulations 2013
• Some potential areas of specific interest to the insurance sector
• A chance to discuss and ask questions