Protecting consumers from mis-selling of mobile telecommunications services

Protecting consumers from mis-selling of mobile telecommunications services

Issued April 29, 2008

Executive summary

BT welcomes any reasonable proposals which protect domestic and small businesses customers from all forms of mis-selling. Indeed, we have actively supported all Ofcom and industry efforts to ensure that adequate consumer protection measures are in place for the selling and marketing of fixed services and we certainly encourage the same types of protections for the mobile sector. However, in order to ensure the optimum level of customer protection, any regulation needs to be clear and unambiguous in terms of what is required of all parties to which the regulation applies, and it needs to be workable. In our opinion, Ofcom’s proposals meet these standards in many respects but fall short with respect to others. We are pleased to have the opportunity to highlight these concerns, which are as follows:

• the framing of the General Condition and that of the Consultation Document may not be fully aligned; 
• the proposed two-month period for implementation is too short; and 
• the level of monitoring and reporting appears to be too onerous.

The first three sections of this response expand respectively on these concerns. Our answers to Ofcom’s Consultation Questions, together with commentary on some of the specific provisions in the draft Condition (notably in relation to the telesales proposals), can be found in section 4.

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