Now pick up your pen to punish the timewasters
As thousands support our campaign to fine firms that don’t answer the phone in ten minutes...
TOdAY, Money Mail is calling on readers to write to their MPs to urge them to back our Pick Up Or Pay Up campaign. We want consumer protection laws to be updated so big businesses face hefty fines if they fail to answer the phone within ten minutes.
So far, you have come forward in your thousands to back our initiative.
Last month, we asked you to sign a coupon expressing your support and our postbag is overflowing with responses. We intend to present these to downing Street to highlight the widespread support for our campaign.
In the meantime, we need you to go one step further. In order for our demands to be discussed in Parliament, politicians must hear your howls of despair. So we’ve created a template for you (printed above) to send as a letter or email to your MP to show them you want action.
Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who is working alongside Money Mail to drive change, says: ‘I urge readers to get in touch with their MP and highlight the customer service issues they face on a daily basis.
‘Only with a change in the law will these big businesses wake up and realise their job is to serve the paying customer rather than themselves.’
Our proposal is simple: we want to update the Consumer Rights Act 2015 with a statutory instrument. This is a form of secondary legislation which can make changes to an existing Act of Parliament.
UndeR our plan, this statutory instrument would give regulators such as Ofgem and Ofcom the power to fine firms who do not answer the phone within ten minutes. It would be up to them to monitor compliance and decide how the fine is calculated.
Solicitor Gary Rycroft, of firm Joseph A. Jones & Co, says: ‘The best way to tackle a law change like this is by beefing up the statutory powers of the regulator.’
Ofgem already has the power to fine energy suppliers up to 10 pc of their turnover if they break licensing conditions.
Ofcom, which regulates telecoms providers, says its maximum penalties differ and it is often the higher of a fixed sum or a percentage of the turnover of the business.
Meanwhile, the Financial Conduct Authority can hand out unlimited fines to companies under its remit, such as banks and insurers.
We know our proposal is possible as similar updates have previously been made to the Consumer Rights Act. For example, the Supplier Guaranteed Standards of Performance for Switching introduced an automatic compensation payment of £30 for customers who experienced delays or mistakes when they switched energy supplier.
But for a statutory instrument to pass through Parliament, we first need to rally enough support from MPs.
And if our inbox is anything to go by, change cannot come soon enough. Pensioner George Johnson, 79, told us he had spent almost an hour-and-a-half trying to get through to Virgin Media on the phone last month.
The retired project manager was left on hold for 30 minutes on his first attempt, then 50 minutes on his second.
And when he tried to use the company’s live ‘chatbot’ service on the computer, he didn’t get a response for 12 hours.
George, from Worcestershire, says: ‘I was made to jump through so many hoops and all I wanted to do was negotiate my new contract. In the end I became so fed up I switched to Sky.’
Another disgruntled reader, Bev Whitmore, has been trying to resolve a billing issue with Scottish Gas for more than six months for a rental property she sold in november.
The 74-year-old retired paediatric nurse says that on one occasion, she was left waiting on the
phone for an hour and 57 minutes. In the meantime, debt collection agencies were sending her threatening letters.
She says: ‘It was very worrying. You are left hanging on the phone for hours and no one ever replies to an email.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do, it feels as though you can never get through to the person you actually need to speak to.’
A spokesman for Scottish Gas says Mrs Whitmore’s case has since been resolved.
A spokesman for Virgin Media says: ‘We thank the Mail for bringing us these individual cases, however these do not represent our average call wait time and represent only a handful of our customer base of six million.’