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4 Mar 2003 : Column 719—continued
Sir George Young: My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk mentioned transparency and openness. One thing that would help this debate would be to have in the public domain more figures showing the actual costs, so that some of the estimates might be challenged and we could see whether the costs were really as high as BT has asserted.
I want to raise with the Minister an issue about which I have written to him twice. I commend his enthusiasm for this subject. He kindly wrote back to me a few days ago in response to a question about the Prime Minister's commitment, made in November, that every school and GP's surgery would be on broadband by the beginning of 2006. I welcome that commitment and I am prepared to believe that the Prime Minister means to adhere to it. I have tried to find out from the Minister how that commitment is to be delivered. What is the mechanism by which the small village schools and the medical centres in the more remote villages in my constituency will be plugged into broadband? Will the Minister direct BT to enable the nearest exchange? Will there be some alternative delivery mechanism, such as fibre optics, wireless or satellite?
This is important because the solution for schools and medical centres is hugely relevant to everyone else in the area, and their not knowing exactly how that commitment will be delivered could result in an obstruction to some of the alternatives that might otherwise be considered. Will the Minister answer the specific question of how he can give a cast-iron guarantee that Overton primary school, for example, will get the service that the Prime Minister has promised it by the end of 2005? Once we have an answer to that question, some of the other questions can be answered. If the solution is to use one particular form of technology, it can be piggy-backed by everyone else in the village, and they, too, can get access to the services that they need. I hope that the Minister will be able to shed some light on that matter.
It would also be helpful if the Minister could commit himself to removing any regulatory obstacles that might confront Ofcom or Oftel in the roll-out of broadband. We do not want unnecessary regulatory hurdles to have to be cleared before we can realise our shared ambition of making this country internationally competitive by having more widely available access to broadband.
Dr. John Pugh (Southport): I am speaking broadly out of sympathy with new clause 2, which calls for a decreased role for regulation, and in support of amendment No. 3, which asks us to take on board a wider public interest. I shall be brief, because I have only one specific concern. I shall then leave the Floor to those who are more expert than I in the ways of the Communications Bill.
I shall concentrate on one specific consumer concern, and on the role of Ofcom and Oftel in addressing it. I have already raised the issue in an early-day motion; it relates to call waiting and telephone queueing systems. We all have experience of being kept waiting, at our own expense, for an answer that never actually comes, and with ringing off in frustration. I have taken up this matter with Oftel, which assures me that it has no powers to address the problem. It looks forward to the Bill's resulting in some codes of practice that will help it to do so.
3 pm
Telephone filtering creates some minor difficulties, but I want to distinguish that issue from call queuing, because although they are related, they create different problems. There are problems with disabled or old people using call-filtering systems when the timing is wrong for them, and there are also problems of access and clarity. I do not want to focus on filtering. Both filtering and queueing are aspects of modern call centres, which were initially introduced as a means of being efficient. Nowadays, they are run predominantly as a way of making a cost saving. We all accept that call centres are the modern sweatshops. We are all familiar with being kept waiting in queues, with endless piped music, with the spurious promise that one's call will be answered quite soon, with the irritating and increasingly common plugs for products that people do not want in the first place, and with the frankly dishonest messages saying that one's call is valued—but never valued enough to be actually answered.
The net effect on the nation is quite appreciable. It is bad for the blood pressure and it leads, I am afraid, to rudeness from us as consumers when we finally get
through to someone who cannot answer the question that we have been waiting for a long time to have answered. There is a massive and unquantifiable cost across the country to individual firms and to individuals themselves. There is also an enormous opportunity cost, in terms of time wasted for individuals and businesses. Apparently, 30 per cent. of calls made to such institutions are futile, with people simply ringing off at a cost purely to themselves.
Mr. Mole: I understand the hon. Gentleman's point, but it is impossible to generalise about call centres across the piece. It is surely down to the business that wants to provide access for its customers to define the standard of customer relationship management that it wants to buy from a call centre or other provider, regardless of which facilities manager is offering the service. An excellent example is the company 24seven, which experienced an overload of calls to its call centre during November's poor weather. The essential question must be: what standard of customer relationship management did it purchase from its provider?
Dr. Pugh: The question is probably simpler than that: what standards should we, as consumers, demand, and how should they be enforced? I recognise that good and bad practice exist, but the latter is currently predominant, and the public expect legislators to do something about it. There is wholesale abuse of the call centre system not simply by the centres themselves, but by people such as ourselves—heaven forbid—who sometimes need to make very long and expensive calls, and who do so on somebody else's telephone. A net effect of all this is substantial profits for the telecoms companies themselves. I should point out that some of these companies number among the serial offenders that profit from such misdemeanours. People are kept waiting, and they pay to be kept waiting.
Everyone recognises this abuse, and they regard it as a big consumer issue. The question is: what precisely is the solution? We need a measure of regulation, and I do not know whether current or foreseen legislation will accommodate it. There are alternative solutions. One could suggest the free market solution, whereby firms that provide a rotten service eventually lose out, but I do not think that that fully addresses the issue. Although firms that keep people hanging on get a bad reputation for call handling, they also make a substantial saving in terms of employee costs.
Secondly, telephone call queues are slightly different from other sorts of queues. One can see a queue in a supermarket and choose to go to another supermarket. One can see a queue at a taxi rank and choose to get the bus home. However, once one is in a call queue, a way out cannot be seen, and to withdraw from it involves a sheer loss.
Thirdly, the telecommunications industry involves a system of dishonest trading. In many cases, people are told that their call will be answered shortly, but in fact it will not be. That is misrepresentation, and at the moment it is not covered by legislation. The fourth reason why a free market solution will not work is because a lot of the calls that one makes are not of a routine character. One has little reason—hopefully—to
telephone an insurance line frequently, so one cannot punish such a call centre by not phoning again, given that the reasons for ringing in the first place are far from routine.The legislation appears to encompass a degree of self-regulation—a code of good practice. I have looked at such codes in this area, and they are wholly inadequate in terms of satisfying consumers that this problem will be dealt with. In any case, a code of good practice would be followed only by good firms; it would not be binding on bad ones.
A third way to resolve this problem—it has been alluded to—is an alternative to the regulation that most of us do not want unless it is really necessary: to hope that technology will so develop that the bad practices that have grown with it will eventually disappear through better technology. Since tabling the early-day motion to which I referred, several organisations that I have contacted have made that suggestion. They suggested that speech-recognition technology might be the way forward and that, some day, we will be able to converse with a mechanised voice at the end of the phone with as much satisfaction as we currently experience when dealing with human operators. A character such as Holly, from the programme "Red Dwarf", will speak to us, and everybody will be able to save money without in any way impairing the service provided to the consumer.
Some people suggest the use of ring-back technology. It is true that, should firms wish to implement it, such technology could be used to enable people to put down the phone yet keep their place in the queue, and to be phoned back at the appropriate moment. That could sharpen up the market, and good firms would undoubtedly adopt such practices. However, I believe that there is a case for regulation. High-volume call centres should, by law, have to advertise their average call waiting times, and they should do so when contact is first made and the phone is picked up. The consumer should have a right to complain to Ofcom and Oftel when those times are routinely exceeded, and Oftel should have the power to warn, and ultimately to penalise, firms that abuse the system. If, after investigation, the problem persists, there should be the potential for Oftel to take action. Such light-touch legislation—for that is all it need be—would save time, money and the nation's blood pressure. I want the Minister to clarify whether current legislation has the potential to incorporate a regulation as solid as this.
Finally, I should like the Minister to clarify a specific point. The winners in all this are the telecoms industry and the telephone companies, and as I said, some of their lines are the principal serial offenders. Is it currently permissible for a call centre firm and a telecoms firm to establish a profit-sharing contract whereby, in return for a discount, the call centre has a real incentive not to answer calls immediately, to mutual profit? That may be the case under current legislation, and I should like the Minister to clarify that point.
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