My Lords, Amendment 5 is an enhanced version of Amendments 14 and 15 in Committee, which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, introduced, but it includes additional principles that I raised and which were contained in the Government’s 2016 paper Switching Principles: Government’s Response and Action Plan. It deals with two issues very close to the interests of consumers: billing and switching. As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said in Committee, mobile phone billing is,
“one of the most complicated areas of domestic expenditure”.—[Official Report, 31/1/17; col. 1145.]
There may be, in particular, some danger of vulnerable customers getting into difficulty and it should be possible for a consumer to set a cap on expenditure on their mobile phone.
As my noble friend Lord Foster pointed out in Committee, most mobile phone contracts are similar to credit card contracts, in that,
“they are a credit agreement, paying retrospectively for services that have been received. Yet with the credit card, of course, a limit is imposed upon you, which is not currently the case with mobile phones”.
He cited evidence from Citizens Advice that,
“in 2014-15 it helped no fewer than 27,000 customers who had problems with mobile phone debts”.—[Official Report, 31/1/17; col. 1147.]
He reminded us that Ofcom alerted us to this problem five years ago and proposed that it could be addressed
by mobile service providers offering an opt-in cap to their consumers. The remainder of the amendment would give explicit power to Ofcom to set the gaining provider-led switching rules, which we all want to see, and sets out the principles which the rules must follow—the very principles which the Government themselves have set out.
We would like to see both these aspects enshrined in primary legislation. In her reply to these amendments in Committee, I am afraid that the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe—was not convincing when she talked of providers offering apps, warning text messages and the like to manage usage, the Government’s expectations for providers to manage bill shock, and of course the guidance issued by Ofcom, which I am sure every consumer reads avidly. That is not enough in this day and age. This is not a draconian requirement. This is a voluntary, opt-in capping system that is being proposed.
As regards switching, the Minister said that Ofcom was being given the necessary powers by Clause 2 and had an existing overarching duty to consumers. This is a much more explicit duty. It also ensures that the Government’s own principles are enshrined in a duty to make rules, which the Minister, however, could not assure me were the ones in contemplation by Ofcom. I hope that the Government will welcome this carefully- thought-through amendment as being very much in the interests of consumers when mobile phone usage is, if anything, even more important than broadband. I beg to move.