BT Service Standards

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Julian Knight

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered BT service standards.

It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall, and I express my gratitude to Mr Speaker for having granted this debate. I am conscious that there are many colleagues here today and presumably, because of their attendance, they have experienced similar problems to those that I have in my constituency. Those issues centre on BT’s inability to deliver its service obligations to its customers—our constituents. I reassure hon. Members that I intend to be generous with my time and in taking interventions, because I know that this subject fills many of our postbags. Lucky constituents have the ability to send us emails, although some of my constituents in Romsey and Southampton North have resorted to quill pen and ink, such is their frustration with their poor service.

I make it clear from the outset that this is not about broadband, although I will mention it, and I am sure that will give colleagues an opportunity to vent. Instead, I plan to focus on the myriad problems my constituents have faced over the course of the last 12 months and, in some cases, BT’s inability even to seek to rectify faults. Its contractors have repeated errors that have caused mayhem in some villages in my constituency.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I was prompted to rise when she mentioned the limits of the service, in terms of faults not being rectified. In my constituency, a 99-year-old lady’s phone line was down, but BT refused to send an engineer. Thankfully, my office forced it to send one in. After the work was done, however, she had a stroke. Her son managed to make phone contact to discover that, but it could have been so very different if the line had not been fixed and her son had been unable to get through. She could have died without immediate assistance, and that shows the importance of phone lines.

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. He makes a really valid point: we rely on our telephones, and not simply to make social calls or to run businesses. They also enable a huge number of elderly people, through modern technology and particularly through their personal alarms, which are connected to the phone service, to live independently and safely in their own homes and to alert relatives to a problem simply at the push of a button.

Inevitably, I will conclude with some specific questions for the Minister and even some suggestions about what BT are doing well, but perhaps might do better. I welcome the publication by Ofcom last month of its review into digital communications, which came after I had applied for this debate, but before I heard that it had been granted. In many respects, the review addresses some of the significant criticisms that I will make today of BT. I was particularly pleased to see its headline point: that Ofcom intends to introduce tougher rules on faults, repairs and installations; transparent information on service quality; and automatic compensation for consumers when things go wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend makes a good point that when services are ordered, there is an expectation that they will be installed. I can think of a case in my constituency where a customer’s order was accepted, but they were told that they could not have it delivered because they were in such a remote location, yet the properties on either side of the customer both had phone services. It just required my input, yet again, to say to BT, “Come on, you can do this. This isn’t the middle of nowhere; there is a telephone network running down the road.”

I turn first to the village of Sherfield English, which is a settlement of about 400 houses, in a linear development, where there has been very little house building over the past 10 years. However, with the increase in people working from home, or perhaps running small businesses, which we would all seek to encourage, there has been growth in the demand for telephone lines. It appears that BT has struggled to keep up with that demand, but rather than telling potential customers that they cannot have a new line and acting transparently, it has accepted the orders. There have then been repeated incidents of contractors working on behalf of BT simply extracting an existing line’s connection to the cabinet and putting in a new one in its place.

I refer in particular to my constituent, Mr Ian Forfar, to whom that has happened four times. I assume that his connection must be at the top of a row of connections within the cabinet. He is now on first-name terms with many members of staff at BT and is in the habit of stopping at the local cabinet when passing if he sees someone working on it, just to check that his line is not about to be disconnected again. Mr Forfar is an extremely articulate, determined man—a man who is not to be messed with. He has provided me with a very clear timeline of all the events that have impacted on his telephone service over the last year or so. Each time he has gone home and found his line dead, it has been because a third-party contractor has taken out his connection in order to provide a new line for a new customer. Mr Forfar was promised a full investigation last year of what was going wrong in Sherfield English, but then the regional manager went on holiday and Mr Forfar heard no more. It comes to something when, earlier this year, Mr Forfar’s line went dead for a fifth time, and he was celebrating because it had been caused by a branch that had fallen across the line.

Lack of capacity seems to be a real problem, and it is not just limited to the rural parts of my constituency. Cabinet No. 7 in Bassett, which is right on the edge of Southampton, has suffered from a lack of availability of new lines, as well as many other faults. Again, one of my constituents—this time a local councillor, Alison Finlay—has provided a very detailed timeline of events, which dates back as far as 2011. In common with the constituents in the middle of Romsey, the cabinet seems to provide a variable service, especially when the weather is not good. I do not know why rain should be such a problem, but as Councillor Finlay puts it:

“I mentioned that care would need to be taken when dealing with Cabinet 7 as my constituents experienced variable levels of telephony…from it, especially during winter months.”

As we heard earlier, many elderly residents are dependent on the telephone line being in good working order for their personal safety alarms. Without a connection, if they push the button on their alarm in the case of a fall or other incident, help might not be just minutes away; in the worst cases, as my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said, it could be many hours or even days away. None of us wants that for our more elderly residents. Independence and the ability to stay in their own home is wonderful and technology today can provide great peace of mind for elderly people and their relatives, but that is dependent on having the network to back up the technology.

Cabinet 7 in Bassett was long scheduled for an upgrade. Indeed, in 2011 Councillor Finlay first flagged up the problems, and the fact that care would be needed with any changes and that they would have to be done with extreme caution because they were known to be very delicate. In December 2015, the cabinet was finally upgraded, after many delays and false deadlines. Sadly, that is not the end of the story because, in January about 30 households were cut off for four weeks, lines were crossed and, according to Councillor Finlay, only a semblance of service was restored.

That is similar to the almost entertaining, interesting experience of the residents of Up Somborne. A few weeks ago, most of the village’s lines were crossed and neighbouring households were providing a message service to one another as lines were swapped and numbers were redistributed, apparently randomly. The spectacle of neighbours running up and down the road passing messages to one another may sound amusing, but in the 21st century it is not acceptable.

BT’s obligations are very clear. For telephony, it has a universal service obligation, meaning that basic telephone services should be available on request for a reasonable fee. For broadband, a universal service obligation is not yet in place but is on its way for 2020, and I warmly welcome that. However, I question how well BT is meeting its obligation to provide a basic telephony service when residents are cut off for four weeks, poor Mr Forfar is a repeat victim of being cut off and residents of Up Somborne are running round the village passing notes to one another.

I am sure that every hon. Member present this morning is here because they have experienced exactly the same sort of problem and their constituents have turned to them because they cannot get satisfaction on their own. That is why the Ofcom review, published two weeks ago, is so important. Ofcom intends to introduce tougher rules on faults, repairs and installations, and I welcome that, but an intention is all very well. I urge the Minister to ensure that there is a stringent timescale for when that will be achieved.

Customers—constituents—want and deserve transparency. They want to know when they can expect a repair to be effected. They also want an automatic right to compensation at a level that is published, clear and available for anyone to check. I am always at pains to point out to constituents that, when service has been interrupted or orders placed and not fulfilled, they are entitled to compensation, but people have to know that to ask for it. How much better an automatic refund will be.

It is interesting to note from Ofcom’s “Strategic Review of Digital Communications” that dissatisfaction with BT is at its highest in rural areas and that slow repairs and installations were the single biggest issue that consumers raised in the review. We all know about the automatic right to compensation for other services, such as electricity, gas and water. Customers left without a phone line often describe it as being akin to a power cut, so reliant are we now on telephone services. So it is good news that Ofcom

“intend to introduce automatic compensation”,

but my question to the Minister is: when?

The review rightly comments that the landscape of digital communications has changed beyond recognition in the 10 years since the last comprehensive review, and I suggest that the gap between large-scale reviews is too long. Perhaps the Minister will urge Ofcom to carry out such reviews more regularly. Given that the new universal service obligation for broadband was announced last November for implementation by 2020, five years would seem to be a reasonable interval. Technology, price and availability change so fast that a decade can seem a lifetime.

Expectations of quality and customer service are rising exponentially and rightly so. We have a technologically literate and demanding customer base whose requirements grow every time a new platform is released. I welcome the news that BT is seeking to bring the vast majority of call centres back to the UK by the end of the year and I congratulate it on that effort to address some customers’ genuine complaints in that respect.

Inevitably—this will not surprise the Minister—I cannot resist making a small reference to broadband because it would be remiss of me not to. There have been many debates in this place and in the House on broadband, its roll-out in rural areas and the great digital divide between the haves and the have-nots: those who are on more than 2 megabits and those who do not receive even that.

The week before last, I received a set of statistics that seemed to suggest that only 1.8% of households in my constituency were receiving less than 2 megabits and I worked that out to be in the region of 700 households. Given the number of complaints I have received, I think I must have been in correspondence with every last one of them. In fact, BT’s own figures show that the number is many times that. Around 20% of my constituents do not receive 2 megabits, and this is in Hampshire, not the Outer Hebrides—[Laughter.] I suspect we are about to hear from the Outer Hebrides. Barton Stacey in my constituency is less than 70 miles from Westminster, but my constituent, Mr De Cani, has been told that he can no longer expect to receive broadband at all. That is despite BT’s accepting his order, delivering a painfully slow and intermittent speed for a while, and now throwing in the towel and saying he is just too far from the cabinet to expect any service.

[Julian Knight]

On cabinets and their location to customers, a number of small businesses in my constituency have told me that BT is refusing to connect them to cabinets outside their premises. Clearly, that is not good enough from BT and is beginning to have a negative impact on small businesses in Solihull and employers across the country. Does my hon. Friend agree that, when the infrastructure is in place, it is unacceptable for BT not to connect to a cabinet that can be seen from the premises?

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. There are examples in Romsey of industrial estates with exceptionally low speeds where customers can see the cabinet on the other side of the road. They desperately want to be connected, but for business customers the regime is wholly different. I have specifically restricted my comments to residential customers, but my hon. Friend makes a valid point. A number of people running very small micro-businesses from home are hugely affected.

There are too many people like Mr De Cani, there are too many properties without access to the services we take for granted, and there are too few solutions coming forward. Mr Blake of East Wellow makes one plea to BT and it is a good one: the technology exists. He works for IBM and went on a tour of a BT facility in Ipswich where he saw the G.fast mini cabinet, which can be placed on a telegraph pole and has the potential dramatically to increase speeds.

Another constituent was here yesterday as part of the SET for BRITAIN student competition and was show- casing her work, which puts amplifiers on fibre optics to increase capacity dramatically. These changes are all coming but we need to make sure they can be trialled. Mr Blake would like to put in a plea to BT today for a G.fast cabinet in Gardeners Lane, East Wellow. It is a fantastic idea and he is very happy to be part of any trial. In places like West Tytherley, communities are coming together and seriously looking at how to arrange wayleaves, dig ditches, lay cable and bypass BT altogether. When that happens, we know that things have got pretty desperate.

My final comments relate to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight air ambulance service, which operates from Thruxton, just north of my constituency, and RAF Benson, but provides services across the whole county of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. To put in place the required high speed broadband and the necessary telephony at its new, upgraded base at Thruxton, the air ambulance service must liaise with BT to get Openreach to do the installation. No direct contact with Openreach is possible and the air ambulance service tells me that its attempts to make sure South Central ambulance service, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight air ambulance service and the operators, Bond Air Services, all have their connection done at the same time to minimise costs have so far been fruitless. It just requires a bit of joined-up thinking and co-ordination to make sure that the trench digging and installation are all done together. I am sure BT will be listening today and will ensure that it happens. When considering the essential and life-saving services provided by the air ambulance service and the lack of coverage by mobile phones in that sort of rural area, a BT solution needs to be provided.

I want to ask the Minister three specific questions. We all welcome the Ofcom review into digital communications, but some timescales should be set for the introduction of automatic compensation for our constituents. I would like consideration to be given to more frequent reviews. As I said, the last Ofcom review was 10 years ago. The landscape changes so fast that every 10 years is not often enough. And I ask that BT be encouraged to continue making the changes that customers want. As I mentioned, 80% of its call centre handling will be done in the UK by the end of this year. That is certainly something that customers are seeking; they feel frustration at the current situation. However, it must be about providing a level of customer service and reliability that we all expect in the 21st century.