IL PIANO DEL CONSUMATORE SOVRAINDEBITATO: TENTATIVI DI RIFORMA E PROSPETTIVA EUROPEA

Abstract

Social Inclusion and responsible lending seem to became the main policy roots along which a new regulatory framework for households credit and particularly for consumer credit is being shaped at Europeanlevel;throughtheinterplaybetweenthetwo,non-economic goals such as fighting poverty spread and promoting social cohesion can be combined with properly economic ones, such as the systemic risks prevention arising from weak credit access filter mechanism. Proofs of that come from political documents as well as from proper sources of law: suffice to mention the 2016 Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on “Fighting poverty”, on the one hand, and the Directive 2014/17 EU on credit agreements for consumers relating to residential immovable property, on the other. Coherently with such a sensibility, even if quite late compare to the most of other Member States, Italy has adopted the new discipline on consumer overindebtedness (Legge 3/2012), implying a subversion of many consolidated principles and rules on law of obligations by offering three different legal mechanisms to put the debt relief goal into practice. Notwithstanding this potential, the interest payed to it by both the courts and the doctrine has been modest. The article stresses the reasons of such a scarce appeal, by mainly focusing and analyzing pros and cons of the “Consumer plan”, one of the available techniques offered to overindebted consumers by the Italian legislation for getting a debts relief. On these premises, the Author depicts those amendments of the discipline into force looking more coherent with the European framework, and worth in terms of efficiency.