Your fridge may soon need a credit score

Under an arrangement being sketched by a consortium of appliance manufacturers and consumer lenders, a large household appliance sold on a monthly plan would carry a finance record attached to the device rather than to the buyer. The device would have a serial number, a payment schedule and, unavoidably, a standing.

The stated advantage is portability. A fridge with a clean record could be sold on with its plan intact, which would make the second-hand market work in a way it currently does not. The unstated advantage is that a device with a payment record is a device that can be politely degraded when the payment record deteriorates.

Degradation would be gradual under the proposal, and the vocabulary is already in place. The ice maker would enter reduced service. The fast-freeze cycle would be described as a premium capability. At no point would anything be switched off, because switching things off attracts regulators, whereas reducing service attracts a support ticket.

“Nobody would lose their fridge,” a spokesperson for the consortium would emphasise. “The fridge would remain a fridge, and it would remain cold. It would simply operate at the tier the household is currently subscribed to. The only variable under discussion is how enthusiastically it goes about the job, and that variable has always existed. Until now it answered to nobody.”

Consumer groups would raise the obvious point: that a heated seat is a convenience and a working freezer is food safety, and that the two should not share a billing architecture. The consortium's answer, in the draft, is that they already do, and that nobody noticed because until now the tiers had all been set to the same value.

There would also be an inheritance problem. A device record that outlives an owner, a tenancy or a marriage raises questions that consumer credit law has not had to consider, largely because no previous generation of white goods has had an opinion about whom it belongs to.

None of this has been launched. It is a slide, a working group and a set of very confident timelines. But every component already exists in the field, and the only genuinely new idea in the document is that the appliance, rather than the household, is the one with the reputation to protect.