My Lords, as we reach the end of this first part of the Bill we have a bit of a conglomeration of amendments in one group. I think we will need to just go through them slowly to get the sense of them.
Amendment 14 is also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and I am grateful to him for his support. It tries to deal with an issue that we probably all agree in this Committee is one of the most complicated areas of domestic expenditure—trying to work out what you owe for your mobile phone. I have never understood the tariffs. I certainly do not understand the various little odds and ends to opt in and opt out of, and I find it hard to get my mind round which bits are prepaid and which are costed at a rate that I do not recognise. Nevertheless, the bill comes in regularly and has to be paid. However, for some people this can be a source of worry and, as with other universal provisions, there may be some danger of vulnerable customers getting into difficulty. We therefore thought it might be interesting to suggest that the mobile operators should be encouraged, either voluntarily or if necessary through some form of statutory provision, to set caps or work on a system under which customers could set caps—more correctly—so that if expenditure was getting out of control on their mobile phone they were not being taken for a ride, even if it was for a relatively short period. Therefore, the idea of a financial cap, which is not uncommon in other areas of consumer expenditure, occurs. The suggestion in the amendment, which I hope the Minister will find of interest, is that it might be a way to make sure that there is a more secure arrangement for this important part of our everyday lives.
6.30 pm
Amendment 15 raises the interesting question of how to switch out of your existing contract if you wish to do so. It is a competitive area—many people offer services in mobile telephony—but it is quite hard to extricate yourself from one contract and move to another. It has been suggested for some time—we raised this in discussion on previous Bills, including the now Consumer Rights Act 2015—that the way to do it is to enable mobile provider-led switching. This amendment would put this on a statutory basis, and suggests that it is the standard we should move to.
The current position as I understand it—I look forward to the Minister’s comments—is that mobile provider-led switching is permitted, that how best to expedite it is being discussed with Ofcom, and that progress is being made. However, it seems to take a long time; we were talking about it during the passage of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 but it came up on earlier Bills as well, and we still do not see very much progress. It is still hard to do, and I will be grateful for further comments on whether this is a helpful initiative in this area.
Amendment 16 picks up on what is already in the Bill on the power that Ofcom will get to set a condition requiring payment of compensation by communication providers to end-users where standards or obligations are not being met. There is a gap in that provision in the sense that nothing there suggests that they should do it within reasonable timescales, and we ask that that be taken into consideration.
Amendment 18 deals with the question of whether coverage is satisfactory. This area has already been raised with regard to amendments earlier in the debate. This amendment would specify conditions under which telecommunications service providers would be required to pay compensation and provide satisfactory mobile coverage, which of course is not currently the case; your coverage is not part of your contract, and we think it ought to be.
Amendment 22 seeks to put into a code of conduct a mandatory provision, so that where broadband speeds are specified in the USO or equivalent requirements, these should be placed in a way which makes them more than just a contractual term in an arrangement. In other words, after consultation, the Secretary of State should make a code of practice which would allow the code to specify what speed information we will get under our broadband services. It would require those providers to make sure that they deal with any problems that arise from that, to ensure that there is no penalty if the customers want to leave a contract, because speeds consistently or even occasionally fall under a specified minimum threshold, and to make sure that information is available around that in a more positive way than at the moment. This would be a good thing for work in this area. However, it raises a wider issue, which also came up during the passage of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
For reasons that we could never get to the bottom of, when one orders digital content—which one increasingly does these days, whether it is books, music or other forms of transfer—the rights you acquire when purchasing that material are not the same as if you acquired it in a physical format. In other words, if you download a CD to your iPod or equivalent and play it and listen to it, you do not acquire the same rights as if you bought that CD in a shop, took it home and played it on the same or a similar machine. We could not understand why that was the case, because the whole purpose of the Bill—I do not wish to rehearse that in this venue—was to try to equalise rights in the digital marketplace with those in the physical marketplace. Yet this was one area where the Government were very stubborn and would not move—although we had a lot of interesting and good debate around other issues, many of which were changed. The argument was largely around whether one could really say that it was comparable to download digital data in a form which was not physical and therefore could not be physically returned if it turned out to be defective. That was the crunch debate. We have moved on since the debates in 2014-15, and we should think much harder about what consumers’ rights should be in a digital age. This probing amendment has been tabled to see whether there is a further appetite in government to take this forward again. I beg to move.