BRITAIN’s lenders are about to get it in the neck. Consumer credit is too easy, personal debt is soaring, and an imminent government white paper could lay a host of new rules on an industry that some think has spiralled out of control.

Good, says Sean Mahon, boss of Cattles, the loan specialist and former doorstep lender that’s trying to change its act. Sorry? Did I hear him right? Yup. His business, he says, is about building relationships. “And responsible lending, and responsible borrowing.” The unscrupulous can go hang.

And no, he adds, a loan firm like Cattles, currently wowing the City with its profit performance, has nothing to do with the mountain of debt being built up by households in this country. It is simply a service provider offering people the opportunity to buy some of life’s essentials that might otherwise be beyond them. Right? Right. He gives a quick, shy smile, before looking slightly wary. Cattles’s bosses have not been great communicators with the press in the past, simply because of the old misconceptions about what doorstep lenders do and don’t do. Why start now? Because with Britain facing consumer-debt problems unlike anything ever seen before, the loan specialists really have to start giving an account of themselves.

Mahon, 57, acknowledegs that and is clearly prepared to try. Broad, bulky, slightly stooped and clenched, as if waiting for a scrum to slam into him — he is a former England under-21 rugby prop triallist so maybe it comes naturally — he exudes cautious determination.

He is a well-liked figure in northern business circles, and rose to the top of Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) before taking the leap into Cattles three years ago.

As such, he is a man who knows the value of a good reputation, and what he has risked by moving into a plc.

“I wanted to know if I could do it on the other side of the fence,” he says in his nowt-fancy Yorkshire accent. “I’m a people person, that’s what I’m good at, and Cattles is a people business.”

It’s also, for some, a controversial business. Founded in Hull 70-odd years ago and now based in Leeds, it’s a specialist finance firm that has pushed its way to a market listing and a £1 billion value in an unglamorous line of work: small loans, collected with interest door-to-door on a weekly basis; and more recently, bigger loans, collected monthly. Money is lent to those who find it hard to get credit elsewhere. Debt recovery is a speciality.

“We’re like the old ‘Man from the Pru’, coming round to collect for something families otherwise couldn’t afford,” says Mahon, just in case I should get the wrong idea.

Cattles’s agents, once a common sight doing their rounds on northern council estates, were more often women than men.

The firm has been on a growth drive for more than a decade. Expanded under its previous boss, Eddie Cran, Cattles has been busy shifting its focus from loans repaid weekly to the more profitable monthly business, bought into nine years ago.

The strategy appears to be on course. Earlier this summer Cattles reported a better-than- expected 30% rise in pre-tax profits to £49.2m for the first half of 2003. There are forecasts of 15% earnings growth this year and 16% next, even with the threat of a consumer credit crunch. The shares are at 335½p, up from 230p in January.

In fact, says Mahon, his firm’s steady expansion has nothing to do with the country’s mounting debt problem. “That’s the credit card companies. We don’t do remote lending. Thirty years ago there was just one credit card, now there are hundreds. Our products have remained the same throughout.”