The motor finance scheme is suspended. Your half of it is not.

On 2nd July 2026 the Upper Tribunal suspended most of the FCA's Motor Finance Consumer Redress Scheme, on terms agreed with the four parties challenging it. Since that date, lenders have not been required to calculate redress, pay redress, or send anyone a letter about compensation owed. The challenges are listed to be heard from 14th to 18th December 2026, or from 16th to 26th February 2027 if the parties seek further disclosure or expert evidence. Judgment follows months after that.

Four days from now, on 30th September 2026, nothing happens.

That date is everywhere. It comes from the scheme as originally published in PS26/3 on 30th March 2026, which gave firms three months from the Scheme 2 implementation date of 30th June 2026 to confirm whether a consumer was owed money and how much. Three months from 30th June is 30th September. Search for it this week and you will find advisory firms, claims management companies and consumer sites all still setting it out as a live timetable, some of them with a countdown.

It has been frozen for nearly three months.

Who a phantom deadline serves

Work out who benefits from a clock that is not running. The consumer is being told to hurry for no reason. The lender has a suspension it did not ask for and a backlog building behind it. The beneficiary is anyone whose business model is sign-ups. A deadline four days away is the single most effective thing you can put in front of someone who has been meaning to deal with their car finance since last summer.

The FCA is unusually direct about this. Its own guidance for consumers on the scheme says to complain directly to your lender for free, and warns that claims management companies may charge over 30 per cent of any compensation. It also warns against signing with more than one, which tells you what it is seeing.

Thirty per cent of a redress payment, for filling in a form against a deadline that does not exist.

Partial suspension is not symmetric

Here is the part almost nobody has read, and it is the reason this is worth your attention rather than your irritation.

The suspension is partial. It stops the lender doing three things: calculating redress, paying redress, and writing to you about compensation owed. Go and read what it does not stop. Firms must still identify relevant complaints and agreements. They must still gather the data needed to establish what the commission arrangements were and how they were disclosed. They must still respond to complainants who are owed nothing, by the ordinary deadlines. They must still keep complainants updated, and still cooperate with the Financial Ombudsman.

Read that list again as a consumer rather than as a compliance officer. The lender's duty to pay you is suspended. The lender's duty to work out what happened is not.

So the evidence base for your case is being assembled right now, by the other side, from their records, with no input from you, while you are being told there is a deadline you should be panicking about.

What to do with three frozen months

When the Tribunal rules and the scheme restarts, the calculation lands on a set of facts. What your commission arrangement was. Whether it was disclosed, when, in what document, in what terms. What you were told when you signed.

Two people will be sitting in front of that calculation. One of them has the agreement, the pre-contract information, the commission disclosure wording and the dealer's paperwork in a folder. The other has whatever the lender's system says, which is the lender's version of a conversation from 2016 reconstructed from a database.

The lender is not going to send you that folder unprompted, because the communications it is obliged to send you are the ones that are suspended. You have to ask. A subject access request under Article 15 of the UK GDPR costs nothing, has a one month statutory response window, and reaches everything they hold on you including the agreement, the commission terms and the internal notes. Ask for the commission arrangement and how it was disclosed by name, rather than as a general request for "my file".

Every dispute I have run has turned on whether the evidence existed before it was needed, rather than on whether the law was on my side. The law is usually on your side. Documents from ten years ago are the constraint.

Compare the two motor claims running this week

On 23rd September 2026 the Competition Appeal Tribunal approved a distribution plan worth £55.87m in the car carrier cartel collective action, brought by Mark McLaren Class Representative Ltd against MOL (Europe Africa) Ltd and others. It covers anyone who bought or leased a new car or van from 37 brands between October 2006 and September 2015, after the European Commission found in 2018 that the shipping lines had colluded and the claim alleged the cost was passed through delivery charges. £92.75m was recovered in total. Payouts start at about £25 a vehicle.

Twenty-five pounds is not going to change anyone's month, and that is not the point. The point is that money is moving in that case and not in the motor finance scheme, and the difference is not how loudly the deadline was advertised. It is that liability was settled in one and is being fought in the other.

Claims pay out when liability is resolved. Deadlines are administration. Confusing the two is how you end up paying someone 30 per cent to hurry.

The principle

A suspension is a gap between the moment a claim is contested and the moment it is calculated, and the person who spends that gap collecting documents is in a different position from the person who spends it refreshing a countdown.

Nothing is due on 30th September. Your subject access request is.

Also worth your time this week

What moved in UK consumer rights in the week to 26th September 2026, and where it matters if you have a dispute open.

• The motor finance redress deadline on 30th September is not running. The FCA's scheme has been partially suspended since 2nd July 2026 by order of the Upper Tribunal. Lenders need not calculate or pay redress, or write to you about compensation, until the challenges are heard in December 2026 or February 2027. Several advisory and claims sites are still publishing the old timetable. Complain direct to your lender for free; the FCA notes claims firms may take over 30 per cent.
• £55.87m approved for distribution in the car carrier cartel case. On 23rd September the Competition Appeal Tribunal approved the claims plan in Mark McLaren Class Representative Ltd v MOL (Europe Africa) Ltd. Anyone who bought or leased a new car or van from 37 brands between October 2006 and September 2015 is in the class. Payouts start around £25 a vehicle, more if you had several. Registration at cardeliverycharges.com.
• Twenty-one CFD firms have closed in an FCA crackdown on misuse of authorisation, with three more cancelling permissions and two enforcement investigations open, the regulator said on 25th September. Worth remembering when a firm cites its FCA authorisation at you as though it were a character reference.
• MPs say Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom are not doing enough for consumers in need. The Public Accounts Committee reported this month that consumer debt to energy and water companies stood at £7.2bn in March 2025, and that fewer than 9 per cent of eligible broadband customers are on a social tariff. If you are on a low income, ask your provider for its social tariff by name.
• Fraud and scam complaints to the Financial Ombudsman hit a record quarter. Q1 2026/27 data shows 9,091 new fraud and scam cases against 6,264 a year earlier, of which 4,956 were authorised push payment scams, out of 53,600 complaints in total.
• The new subscription cancellation rules have slipped again, to Spring 2027. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 regime, previously expected this autumn, brings two 14-day cooling-off periods and proportionate refunds. Until it commences, your cancellation rights come from the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 and your contract terms.
• A pension adviser has been banned and fined £742,700 over reckless defined benefit transfer advice covering 63 transfers for 53 clients. FCA fines in 2026 now total roughly £17.96m.
• Citizens Advice rates suppliers serving 14 million households below 3 out of 5 for customer service in its energy Star Ratings, against a sector average of 3.09.
• Project Gigabit is 38 per cent through its contracted premises, with 318,000 of 846,770 covered as at September 2026. Useful if a provider tells you there are no upgrade plans for your address.

Stand stronger. Start a free case.