ANP extension
ANNOUNCEMENTS•
From next year, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht will remove BKR reports from residents who get out of debt faster.
Now people who have completed a debt process are registered with the Credit Registration Office for another five years. In the four big cities this will soon be six months. The four cities together handle half of the total debt assistance in the Netherlands.
According to the municipalities, this change is also a signal that better agreements need to be made at national level. There were already discussions about this, but according to BKR director Peter van den Bosch, the minister wants to stick to the five-year term. An adaptation of the term is a political consideration, “BKR records only”.
Grind
Municipalities already have the authority to remove residents from the BKR register if they deem it proportionate.
From now on, everyone who reports to the municipality will be manually removed from the register, says a spokesman for the municipality of Utrecht. “But it would obviously be more effective if BKR did it automatically for everyone after six months.”
The spokesman calls the recording “a millstone”. When granting loans or mortgages, banks first look at BKR records.
How long this information remains on the record could therefore have consequences when financing a home to buy or when taking out another mortgage. For example, a phone subscription with a device that costs more than €250 are transmitted to BKR.
“Relapses will increase”
BKR director Van den Bosch himself sees the importance of the five-year mandate. “If a customer goes to a bank for a loan or mortgage, the bank is legally obligated to conduct customer research,” he points out. “Can a bank do better if it has all the information or is it missing some?”
Furthermore, the director fears that more people will go into debt again if the registration is shortened. “We already see it happening now that logging is stopped after five years. If that period gets even shorter, we have a lot less information about these people.”
The Utrecht municipality spokesperson strongly disagrees: “If people have successfully completed their debt counseling process and are still getting aftercare, why should a record stick around for another five years?”
