The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills has today launched a consultation on a proposal to change the duties of Ofcom.

Members who are concerned about Ofcom will be interested to read the proposals and perhaps to respond.

I personally see this proposal as worthy of strong opposition. Responses to the consultation will provide a valid opportunity for expression of concern about the way in which Ofcom presently interprets its principal duties. (It is however only a consultation.)

The consultation document is published here: http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file52538.pdf.

Thank you SCV.
Have I missed something? The document has Annexe B consulting ICSTIS, but not PhonePayPlus. Has someone seen the light?

Note this consulation closes today so if anyone has nothing better to do this evening here are the consultation response details:-

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How to respond 2.1 Consultation opened on 13 August 2009 and the last date for responses is 25 September 2009. 2.2 When responding please state whether you are responding as an individual or representing the views of an organisation. If you are responding on behalf of an organisation, please make it clear who the organisation represents by selecting the appropriate interest group on the consultation response form and, where applicable, how the how the views of members were assembled. 2.3 If you decide to respond this way, your response can be submitted by letter or email to: Name: Rachel Clark/John Brumwell/Simon Moseley Team: Communications & Content Industries Department for Business, Innovation and Skills UG28-30 1 Victoria Street London SW1H 0ET Tel: 02072151780/3705/1784 Email: rachel.clark@bis.gsi.gov.uk or john.brumwell@bis.gsi.gov.uk or simon.moseley@bis.gsi.gov.uk

I sent this response to the consultation:-


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-------- Original Message -------- Subject:      Response to BIS Consultation on Proposed New Duties of Ofcom Date:      Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:59:28 +0100 To:      rachel.clark@bis.gsi.gov.uk, john.brumwell@bis.gsi.gov.uk, simon.moseley@bis.gsi.gov.uk CC:      luffp@parliament.uk, whittingdalej@parliament.uk, bottomleyp@parliament.uk, stephen.timms@bis.gsi.gov.uk, ben.bradshaw@culture.gsi.gov.uk Dear Sirs, Response to BIS Consultation on Proposed New Duties of Ofcom (www.berr.gov.uk/files/file52538.pdf) As a relatively informed consumer of telecoms services and a longstanding campaigner against Ofcom's quite grotesque failure to prevent major anti-competitive distortions being introduced in to the UK telephony marketplace via the plague growth of covert revenue share NTS numbers and also the subsequently increasingly anti-competitive massive price increases in per call charges for fixed line phone calls by BT (since its pricing was de-regulated) the very words Ofcom fill me with a combination of both despair and contempt towards one of the two most singularly failed so called regulatory bodies in any major western nation today, the other one also being British and called OFGEM.  It appears to me that the higher and more ludicrously out of proportion to normal civil service pay salaries the pay of the top executives of these out of control super regulators is made the more they attract in untrustworthy sharks from the industries that they are suppose to be tasked with regulating on behalf of the public.  These overpaid ambitious careerists are not usually actually interested at all in protecting the interests of the consumers they purport to protect but are usually instead only interested in cosying up to the New Labour government in the hope of another well paid later appointment from that government and then usually also in due course picking up a peerage and/or a knighthood. I do not intend to make my response to this consultation particularly long because I have made that mistake before in my responses to 10 or more Ofcom consultations, two ICSTIS (now PhonePayPlus) consultations and a recent consultation by the Department of Health, surprise surprise once again on the scourge of over priced NTS numbers that now plague the health service, all thanks to Ofcom and its equally incompetent and telecoms industry infiltrated predecessor, OFTEL. You say in your report that Ofcom's previous principal duty to "further the interests of consumers of communications services where appropriate by promoting competition" has tended to put the emphasis on short term cost reduction rather than longer term investment in future infrastructure and I would agree with that observation but would then add that Ofcom also has not ever succeeded in introducing real competition in to the telecoms marketplace but instead only sham competition where a number of new entrants have been allowed to land grab customers with call packages that promise low per minute call charges along with apparently cheap inclusive broadband and line rental but then also try to hide from customers that they then become locked in to long contract terms where they soon discover they are subject to numerous other anti-competitive and extremely unreasonable charges for calling NTS (084/7) numbers of companies of whom they are already captive customers.   And in order to let these companies and their accountants guarantee their revenue streams Ofcom has presided over a veritable orgy of anticompetitiveness in the last three or so years (since it de-regulated BT retail prices) in which first basic phone line rental (then called BT Standard but now called BT Unlimited Weekend Calls Plan) was allowed to be hiked up by over 50% and consumers forced to pay for a base BT calls package, even if they did not make calls with BT,  and then in Phase 2 of this abusive alteration to price structures the minimum call charge for calls to 01/02/03 numbers not within inclusive call plans has been hiked 180% by BT in four years (from 5p to 14p).  The reason this has been done is clearly to keep the accountants of these large blue chips happy and so that most customers are now blackmailed in to taking Anytime fixed price call plans, instead of paying as they go per call.  These Anytime call plans are clearly good value for families but for single elderly people not making many calls at all and young single people mainly using a mobile and who are out not at home for most of the day (many of whom only have their landline for broadband) they have seen a vast increase in the cost of their fixed line telephony services.  One presumes that apart from guaranteeing income streams that customers being blackmailed in to having take a conventional POTS fixed line calls package is also helpful to the large telcos in preventing any growth of small competitor voip telephony services over broadband as an alternative to conventional dialled telephone calls on handsets.  However this is hardly good news for the consumer.

Continued/...........

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So Ofcom's only achievement over several years appears to have been to create a mirage of sham competition in the UK while BT still retains by far the largest part of the fixed line telecoms market place and has the highest standing charge per month of any utility in the UK by a rather large margin. So far as investment in telecoms infrastructure is concerned Ofcom's policies have been quite disastrous since by not attempting to control the marketplace in any fashion, so that investment and competition also took place in the countryside, the large and aggressive competitor telcos have invested mainly only in cities and towns that were already relatively well served by BT's infrastructure and in the UK's largest 1000 telephone exchanges there has been hugely wasteful duplication of LLU equipment installation with these exchanges having 5 or 6 different LLU operators on site each, often from operator companies who have since been merged in to one larger company.  The development of wireless broadband and Wimax technologies in the countryside is also greatly hindered by the anti competitive pricing model that BT has been allowed to inflict where customers are now tied in to long contracts where they perceive their individual calls are free but are meant to overlook an outrageously high BT Wholesale/Openreach monthly line rental fee (from which those so called free calls are clearly cross subsidised) that BT continue to somehow hoodwink Ofcom in to accepting as being reasonable. By all means give Ofcom a duty to also "promote efficient investment in future infrastructure" if you want to but the culture of Ofcom is such that it will almost certainly be done in an incompetent and a telecoms industry centric way in which the real interests of consumers do not get a look in and there is very little in the way of real world competition.  In my opinion Ofcom is not fit for purpose as it does not ensure that telcos do not behave anti-competitively but has instead de-regulated price controls without any thought or proper balance in a way that has let the telecoms giants only give a good cheap deal for anyone who lives in a town, has a large family size and never moves.  Any smaller households who live in the countryside and move regularly now have to pay premium vastly increased telecoms and broadband price that have seen phone bills for single and elderly people hugely driven up under Ofcom's so called model of competition. Ofcom has singularly failed to stop the quite deliberate attempts of the telcos to mislead the public about real telecoms costs by letting them quote low headline call prices and then bringing in scam hidden high prices (084/7) call charges that it also allowed these suppliers to misbill as Lo-call, local call or national rate so what confidence should we have about Ofcom being in any way fit to promote investment in telecoms infrastructure in a manner which will actually be in the best interests of consumers? Questions in Your Consultation The questions in your consultation make it clear that this is another inside job and that you clearly only expect responses from your chums in the telecoms industry to the consultation, since none of the questions are relevant to me as informed telecoms consumer.  However I hope you will have understood from my response that I believe that Ofcom is a highly inefficient and incompetent regulator that is not doing its job properly in ensuring truly competitive markets for telecoms consumers and I therefore have no confidence that it will be any better at controlling efficient investment in infrastructure.  In my opinion it is likely that Ofcom will only allow investment in infrastructure to take place in a manner that is to the maximum commercial advantage of the current commercial incumbents but that does as little as possible to break down the excess power of those incumbents and make the UK telephony marketplace more truly competitive. Yours in severe disillusionment, Regards,