carbheatcold
The Office of Fair Trading, which oversees trading standards departments, confirms the view in my previous posting:
"Section 75 liability
Section 75 provides that the credit grantor will be jointly and severally liable with the supplier for breach of contract or misrepresentation if all of the following conditions are satisfied:
<sum> The cash price of the item supplied is over £100 but not more than £30,000 (including VAT).
The section requires that an item should be a ‘single item’, which will depend upon the facts of the case. The courts would be likely to look at how the goods were marketed. A set of golf clubs sold as such for £200 would be covered, even though each individual club is worth less than £100; whereas airline tickets can be viewed as separate contractual items, so that 4 tickets costing £50 each would not enjoy the protection of s.75, despite the fact that the total value of the transaction is £200. However, the case might be different if the tickets were marketed as a package, e.g. as a family holiday.
Where a deposit of £100 or less has been paid on credit for goods or services with a cash price of over £100, then s.75 will still apply. This is because a ‘transaction financed by the agreement’ for the purposes of s.75 (1) is to be interpreted as one financed wholly or partly by the credit agreement. The liability of the card-issuer is not limited to the amount paid by credit card or indeed the cash price of the goods. Where a consumer has made a purchase whose cash price is within the monetary limits (even though only a small deposit may have been paid by card) s/he will be able to bring a claim against the card-issuer for all reasonably foreseeable losses flowing from any misrepresentation or breach of contract by the supplier."
For the full article, see
http://www.oft.gov.uk/html/consume/credit.htm and click on 'Rights when purchases go wrong'.
big.al
The same article also discusses your rights when using a credit card to buy goods or services abroad. The OFT takes the view that you should be covered in the same way, but concedes that "any claim for breach of contract or misrepresentation is likely to be governed by the law of the country in which the goods or services were purchased, and not by UK law, and so it may be more difficult for consumers to establish liability".