I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for joining me on Amendment 14 and I welcome the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, with whom we can agree on one thing and disagree on another. I am sure that that will continue—he is a contrary sort of chap and it is sometimes difficult to work out where he is coming from.
I like the phrase “bill shock”—I had not come across it before. It is an issue that might be dealt with in the forthcoming Green Paper and therefore I accept that at this stage we need not progress further on that amendment. However, I should like to reflect on my experience of trying to deal with accounts from my provider of mobile telephony. It is complicated by the fact that I also, stupidly, pay my children’s bills. I should not do that because, if I can never work out what their bills are, I certainly cannot work out my bills, and the combination is almost impossible.
The only way that you can interrogate your bill from that particular provider, whose name begins with a “V”, is by going on to the website and logging in. That is fair enough, but you cannot access your account until the provider sends you a text message on your mobile phone with a number that you have to enter in. That methodology is now becoming common among the banks. However, it does not work in a not-spot, so I cannot reach my account. I cannot interrogate it, I cannot set caps and I cannot do all the things that the noble Baroness talked about in her full and very interesting response. Therefore, there is an issue there with some of the technology that is still being used. I do not think that it is anti-competitive or anti-consumer but it borders on the “difficult to use”. I think that there is an issue there that we might want to come back to, although a Green Paper may well be the right way forward.
If we could have a letter on gainer provider-led switching, that would be very helpful. This is an area where I do not think there is any doubt about where we are trying to get to, but the pace seems glacial and I do not understand what the barriers are.
On the two points on payment, I accept that a paper offering a consultation on that would be useful. If I am correct about the timescale, it seems a little unfortunate that it will appear later than the completion stage of the Bill. The Minister mentioned the spring, but if she could give us some detail in writing about when it is likely to be available, that will be helpful.
With regard to the voluntary code of practice, we come back to the point that we raised on Amendment 1 regarding what the USO will be if it does not have teeth. In some senses, an aspiration is fine and a floor is also fine, but if the code is to be used to make real progress in this area, we have to try to make sure that the ISPs that try to operate it find that it contains something that they have to deliver on. I will look carefully at the Minister’s response and we may come back to that point.
Finally, I turn to my Amendment 233 on digital content. The debates are obviously very familiar. Indeed, I think that the Minister may have been present at one or two of the previous ones and therefore what we say will ring even more loudly in her mind. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, was quick to pick up the main point, but time is moving on. So much more material is now downloaded and not supplied in hard copy, and at some point we will have to look at this again. The more the Minister talks about a strong and vibrant software industry, the more that speaks to me of customers being put at the bottom of the priority list, and I do not think that that is right. It is difficult to operate in a digital environment without the proper digital legislation. I am not sure that we know yet what that is and I accept that we may need more time to go through it. I signal that this is something that we may have to come back to at some point but, in the interim, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.