Letter from the Ombudsman Service Ltd
to the Inquiry Manager, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
As I said during our telephone conversation,
we haven't received very many complaints so far. There are two
main reasons for this:
(i) the Ombudsman Service can only investigate
complaints against members, who are defined as Public Communications
Providers (PCPs) in the Communications Act 2003, and the vast
majority of our members are the carriers of the calls but have
no control over the "end-use" of these calls because
they are to non-members, such as ITV and other TV companies;
(ii) the large majority of complaints about
these calls will already have been made to our members, who will
have informed complainants about the situation, ie that they are
merely the carriers of the calls and have no control or influence
over either the initiation or termination of the calls, and the
Ombudsman will only have received a small percentage of such contacts.
For your information, the Ombudsman's Terms
of Reference, require that a complaint against a member company
can only be accepted after the member has been afforded a reasonable
opportunity to resolve the complaint and has failed to do so to
the satisfaction of the complainant. The time-scale for this resolution
is 12 weeks and, hence, the Ombudsman would not be able to accept
a complaint unless it had been in progress for more than this
time. It would also be possible for a member to "deadlock"
a complaint and refer the customer to the Ombudsman before 12
weeks had elapsed, when it became clear that no further progress
was possible between the two parties.
Members, such as BT, TalkTalk or Vodafone will
have advised complainants to talk to ICSTIS, the regulator of
the Premium Rate Service (PRS) industry, or Ofcom, the telecoms
regulator. In turn, these bodies will have advised consumers to
write to the companies concerned (as you probably know, the ICSTIS
web-site enables consumers to identify the companies related to
the particular numbers on their bills) in order to seek clarification
about the charges and to request a refund, where the customers
believe that they have been over-charged.
The Ombudsman issued an Advice Note to our member
companies on 30 October (attached), in relation to Quiz TV complaints.
You will note that the note describes the policy that will be
employed in accepting and dealing with complaints from consumers
about our members. You will also note a reference in the document
to "rogue" diallers, which was one of the subjects of
a previous Advice Note (in October 2004) which dealt with PRS
calls in general.
As I mentioned during our conversation, the
Ombudsman has received a small number of complaints about Quiz
TV calls. The majority of them involved the customers' dissatisfaction
with the number of calls that had been registered against their
accounts. Most customers admitted that some calls had been made
but expressed themselves astonished at the numbers which were
actually recorded and believed that they had been overcharged
by the networks that carried the calls. Almost all customers had
been referred to ICSTIS and some had contacted the TV companies
concerned in order either/both to claim a refund or to check on
the numbers of calls recorded and charged for. Only in a minority
of cases was there apparently any ability by the TV company to
provide a list of the customer's calls which could be checked
against the PCPs' recorded and charged calls. Most TV companies
appeared not to have recorded such calls at all. However, further
information about this should be obtainable from ICSTIS, which
will have assisted consumers on a much larger number of occasions.
The Ombudsman has received about 25 complaints
in all (in the context that we have investigated 5,500 complaints
in 2005-06), beginning in early 2005 (about a radio quiz show),
followed by occasional cases throughout the remainder of the year,
generally about Quiz TV. 2006 also started off with occasional
complaints about Quiz TV but the most recent cases have been about
QuizMania and the Great Big British Quiz. It is mostly the fixed-line
networks that have carried these calls, although a couple of complaints
about a mobile have been received. The large majority of the Ombudsman's
decisions have been that the network has carried the calls and
customers have been charged correctly by the carrier because all
of the available evidence indicates that the calls were made from
the customer's telephones.
24 November 2006
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