back to article UK.gov looks to data to free people from contract lock-in doom

The UK government is pushing telcos, banks and energy firms to improve data portability in a bid to tackle the scourge of consumers everywhere – confusing, complicated and hard-to-escape contracts. The government has historically had a tough time effecting change, even though the markets are regulated. Ofcom this summer …

  1. Tom 7

    We have the technology and the standards

    but they'll still fuck it up.

    1. Spanners Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: We have the technology and the standards

      By "accident" of course!

  2. Andytug
    Joke

    We could always teach people to better understand numbers....

    but then they might also be able to see through misleading government statistics, and we can't have that, can we........

  3. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    One lives in hope

    I find car insurance companies are by far the worst offenders. Extortionate fees and a maze of add-ons. Of course it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you are obliged by law to have it - to even have a car sitting on the street.

    To paraphrase: "There is no such thing as a poor car insurance company."

  4. Rol

    Business Opportunity!!

    Your very own personal life manager.

    A totally independent, not for profit organisation that you entrust to act in your best interest.

    You set up a profile with them and they set out to get you the best deals on everything you require.

    Whether it be your electricity, gas, phone, broadband, car insurance, whatever, they will automatically do everything to keep your life on the rails, as cheap as possible, and you don't have to do a thing, they just act on your behalf and you just keep meandering through life oblivious to the contract negotiations being hammered out for you, with just one direct debit per month being paid to your manager who then covers all of your contracts.

    Never again will you be at loggerheads with the retention team of some scheming corporation that considers your end of contract oversight as a signal to hike your bills.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Business Opportunity!!

      How is your proposed "not for profit" a business opportunity?

      1. Rol

        Re: Business Opportunity!!

        It's a business opportunity in the same way a charity is a great earner for senior management.

    2. Alan Hope

      Re: Business Opportunity!!

      Basically, the cheapest contract for each service would immediately get 100% of the customers. Then to stop themselves going to the wall all other companies would have to undercut because if they offered the same price, then absolutely no reason to change.

      A perfect free market! Would end up with the first company offering just-keep-afloat pricing surviving, and all the others would go bust. Then might as well nationalise it and run it entirely at cost.

      1. BongoJoe

        Re: Business Opportunity!!

        In Wales there's a scheme where one could sign up to register for such a thing for gas and/or electricity. Then every six months or so this outfit would go around to all of the suppliers and say "Whatcha got?". Then the cheapest offer would be reported back to the subscribers to this service.

        Often the price offered would be cheaper than shopping around oneself as the utility companies realise that they could have thousands more customers arrive overnight.

        Having moved to Scotland after a year travelling on the road, I don't know if there's such a scheme up here or even if it's still going in Wales. If you're living in the Principality it's worth checking out.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Here's an idea. Ban introductory offers. That way you can have a true free market where they fight for your custom by reducing prices or offering a better service. The current system is loaded in their favour because people don't switch. Also make electricity and gas billed by the unit on the meter, none of this high level mathematics crap just to work out the cost based on usage and ban estimated reading charging, no reading no bill.

  6. Patrician

    "fight for your custom by reducing prices or offering a better service."

    This doesn't always work in the consumers favour; this happened in the broadband market starting around ten years ago and resulted in a race for the bottom. ISP's kept offering unrealistic pricing for their service that meant that anytime outside the wee small hours of the morning, the contention ratio of your connection was so high that you didn't stand a snowballs chance in hell of getting anything like the speed you were paying for.

    I'd far rather pay a realistic amount for my broadband so long as that means that the ISP isn't over selling accounts in my area and I actually get the speed and quality of service I pay for,

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So the one that offers the better service gets your custom or are you saying in the model I propose everyone will just be crap?

      ISP a charges £10 but service is crap

      ISP b charges £15 but service is great

      You choose b.

      The current model is everyone offers a similar service but for the first 12 months you pay x then pay x+y and everyone is different with different contract lengths. If you don't switch you pay more. Why not have fixed price x and let them fight it out. That's how a free market is supposed to work rather than putting the work onto the customer to switch and navigate all the options to find the best price and service. It's like the supermarkets, I know how much potatoes are in each supermarket and the quality so I make my choice based on that, why can't that apply here? Then everyone can have chips for tea.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        That's how a free market is supposed to work

        Errr...how is it "free" if all suppliers have to abide by a market structure you've just plucked from your bottom without a jot of supporting evidence?

        Why stop there? You could have a government bureaucrat decides what may be sold, by whom, on what conditions, even to an extent the price. I work in a market like that, and despite thirty years of onerous and increasing regulation, public satisfaction remains poor, as does supplier profitability (soon to get worse). Which rather suggests that regulation doesn't improve standards, nor the benefits gained by either buyers or sellers.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Yeah I suppose my terminology is wrong here though what I mean is the idea of the free market or maybe my idea of how the free market should work.

          The government is supposed to be there to regulate the free market so it's fair for both customers and suppliers, at least that's what I thought. Then I suppose it's not free if it's regulated.

          All I know is introductory offers skew the market by penalising customers that stay and forcing others to switch, without that you could choose your best option and stick with it. Tis just my opinion.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            All I know is introductory offers skew the market by penalising customers that stay and forcing others to switch, without that you could choose your best option and stick with it. Tis just my opinion.

            A valid opinion, but it is worth thinking through the logical business consequences of stopping what we might term "cut throat competition". It is true that all commodity service sectors (pay TV, broadband, energy, insurance to name some of the many practitioners) use this approach, although they politely term it "customer acquisition pricing". But if you stop that from happening, what then? In true commodity markets there's limited opportunity to differentiate if you can't use offers to differentiate - you have service quality and price alone. Experience in all commodity sectors is that you don't get a continuum of differing price & service offers, with each customer choosing their comfort zone, you have a price leader, and a service leader. There's a few pretenders around both, although more around the service leader because that's easiest to try and enter the market, but broadly speaking it always gravitates towards two main players and a small fleet of minnows.

            Apply that to broadband as an example. BT and VM lose their local loop and cable advantages to make it a level playing field, and there's no introductory offers. Other suppliers move in, and before long all price conscious customers have all moved to one player (BT, TalkTalk, or who ever is last man standing in this race to the bottom). Don't forget that although any large player has economies of scale, they are a one way ticket, and once any supplier is cheapest in this market, they acquire more and more price conscious customers, and that reinforces the cheapness. Anybody offering a "not the cheapest, nor best service" commodity deal watches their customers run away. At the other end of the same market, you've got perhaps Zen, with A&A offering something a bit more specialised still for the tiny number of customers who actually will pay for service. Most customers will enthusiastically agree with the proposition "I will pay more for better service", but in practice their behaviours don't support that - as the CEO of my last company can attest after losing one and half million customers during a five year plan designed to improve retention by superior service.

            Does a choice of two and a bit suppliers strike you as good for consumers? Current arrangement may not be good, a state managed attempt to "improve things" will only be worse. it is a bit like democracy - the least bad of the alternatives.

      2. Patrician

        Reply Icon

        So the one that offers the better service gets your custom or are you saying in the model I propose everyone will just be crap?

        Unfortunately in the model you propose, and as it happened, broadband prices got lower and lower, each ISP undercutting the others, to the point that the only way it could be profitable was to massively over subscribe their service; relying on the ones that just use their connection for email and web browsing to subsidise the ones that used their connection for gaming, streaming services etc. Eventually nobody could get anywhere near the connection speed they were paying for outside of very off-peak hours.

  7. Mark 85

    Competition??? Really???

    At the same time as trying to get companies to change, the government hopes to make switching easier for consumers.

    This would serve the dual purpose of encouraging competition in the fields,

    There's the problem. Why would any company want to make it easy for a customer to go anywhere else? And why would any company want competitors?

    Companies want profit and lowering prices for "competition" isn't what they want. They want a monopoly where they have all the customers and all the profits.

  8. spold Silver badge

    Please suspend the notions of sensible and practical...

    GDPR - and through it the UK Data Protection Act - enshrines the obligation that if I get pissed of with any supplier (banks, insurance, power whatever) I can go to them and say "you know what you suck, I'm moving to [newco] - please parcel up all my data and send it down the street to them so I still have all my historical and account data without me farting around giving it to them". As an idealistic privacy guy and a consumer I think this is a jolly good idea! Put my IT hat on I say WTF!!!! how!!! what format!!! etc....

    So it is a wonderful idea for the best of reasons but nobody involved actually understood or gave a flying fuck about the realities of doing so....

    1. BongoJoe

      Re: Please suspend the notions of sensible and practical...

      Ah, your IT Hatted persona is correct. But sometimes this is needed.

      For example my medical records going from Wales to Scotland isn't a handy simple transfer and all the useful bits are lost. The same between England and Wales because if one is registered with the local abattoir (that's the Betws Cadwallader Trust) and the consultant is in England then no data whatsoever goes between the two.

      I've a useful blood group (O neg) and there is no provision for transfer of data of my blood milking between England, Scotland and Wales.

      Hey ho. It is the twenty first century, so what can one expect?

  9. The_Idiot

    A cynical...

    ... might wonder if, at some point, the government will say 'well, we're here to make things easier for you. You give us copies of all your data, and we'll sort out the whole porting thing for you. And we _promise_ not to use the data for anything, um, naughty. Or sell it to folks you might not want us to.

    Of course, that would be just an excess of cynicism, wouldn't it. Couldn't possibly ever happen. Er... right?

  10. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

    I wonder if they'll also look at the tactic TalkTalk (and I imagine others) use - shortly before a fixed term contract rolls over, they have a habit of phoning up the customer and offering a "free" something. This might be a free router upgrade, or an upgrade to include a TV box, or ...

    But what they don't make clear to the non-savvy user is that the user is inadvertently signing up to a new 12/18/24/whatever contract so they're locked in for a further term.

    Did that to my (now) Mrs. I'd been waiting for the previous lock-in to expire so we could switch - then I got home to be told that "TalkTalk are giving us a free TV box". Aaaaaaaah. To say they were "difficult" to deal with (I invoked our legal right to cancel during the cooling off period) would be an understatement.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But what they don't make clear to the non-savvy user is that the user is inadvertently signing up to a new 12/18/24/whatever contract so they're locked in for a further term.

      In which case the lock is not binding, regardless of any attempt to claim to the contrary. Since all large companies record calls, you can even ask for a copy of all call recordings to see who's right.

      Looking at the complaints data for several large comms companies (eg Virgin Media, and others), even when they know they are in the wrong they will often resist up to the point the customer actually makes a complaint to the arbitration services (that's CISAS for most telcos and ISPs), and then they'll cave in.

      The rationale is far fewer people will actually complaint to CISAS than those who threaten - or the customer will complain to a toothless body that won't intervene, like Ofcom. If CISAS take on a complaint, there's a circa £400 case fee paid by the telco, but if they immediately settle it is only about £150. This shows up in the high number of complaints made to CISAS but settled before ajudication. Yet another thing Ofcom should sort out, but don't.

      1. BongoJoe

        Since all large companies record calls, you can even ask for a copy of all call recordings to see who's right.

        How many times have you managed to secure a copy of this conversation in cases where the recording would benefit you and not the organisation?

      2. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

        In which case the lock is not binding, regardless of any attempt to claim to the contrary.

        I wasn't party to the conversation, but they probably have a carefully prepared script, read out quickly, so that they will have complied with the requirements - but in a way that the typical non-savvy user will not realise the significance (SWMBO doesn't read contracts and turns off when read anything sounding like one - so she would be unaware and it wouldn't be the company's fault).

        Anyway, I got away from them, and apart from them trying to claim for the 18months charges for early cancellation (the bit about them being "difficult to deal with") haven't looked back.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The retailers will still find ways to make it impossible to compare plans, unless there is some standard mandated.

    Also lets start with a basic no frills plan every provider has to provide, with a standard set of parameters so people have no issues comparing.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Slippage

    Problem is less pricing than unreasonable contract rules, the concept that it is okay to fleece people who do not jump out of contracts as soon as possible.

    Classic one is the cancellation charge, supposedly there are no longer supposed to be hidden costs and yet suppliers often insist upon a charge in the same order as if they had provided the service if you cancel.

    I presume they get around the "reasonable" charge by getting a supposed third party to insure their payout from customer. So when customer leaves then they are presented with a bill for the insurance, which is unsuprisingly virtually the same amount as if they were still receiving the service.

    Basically the consumer guaranties the providers profits by still having to pay even if they cancel so the holistic answer is to limit service contracts to one month. This will limit the impact of their unreasonable practices. The suppliers have had more than enough time to be reasonable but for years they have failed to clean up their own act so limitation is the only way to provide the customer with a reasonable choice.

    There have never been guaranties in any other business so why should the suppliers be allow to demand that they have guaranteed profits.

  13. Steve Jackson

    This kind of smacks of "haven't thought this through" doesn't it?

    The whole cat and mouse game revolves around the stupid tax / inertia.

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