CP
The Consumer Credit Act 1974, Part VI, Section 75, states that:
(1) If the debtor under a debtor-creditor-supplier agreement falling within section 12(b) or (c) has, in relation to a transaction financed by the agreement, any claim against the supplier in respect of a misrepresentation or breach of contract, he shall have a like claim against the creditor, who, with the supplier, shall accordingly be jointly and severally liable to the to the debtor.
(2) Subject to any agreement between them, the creditor shall be entitled to be indemnified by the supplier for loss suffered by the creditor in satisfying his liability under subsection (1), including costs reasonably incurred by him in defending proceedings instituted by the debtor.
(3) Subsection (1) does not apply to a claim –
(a) under a non-commercial agreement, or
(b) so far as the claim relates to any single item to which the supplier has attached a cash price not exceeding £100 or more than £30,000.
Note that the Act refers to a transaction financed by the agreement, rather than a transaction financed wholly by the agreement; this is interpreted as meaning that as long as you pay part of the price by credit card (and the rest by cheque, say) you can recover the whole amount from the credit card company as long as the total price is more than £100 or less than £30,000. So I was wrong to say you'd be covered for £49k in my original posting, as it's more than £30k, but I stand by the rest.
I'm not aware of any case law on this, presumably because everybody within the industry follows this interpretation...
As for escrow accounts, in theory they are fine as long as the trustees are reliable. There have been cases, for example, of tour operators who claimed that their clients' money was protected by an escrow account, only for them to go bust and for trading standards to discover that the account contained a few pounds – hardly enough to get stranded travellers home!