BT Service Standards

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. Thank you for calling me, Mr Nuttall. I thank the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for clearly setting the scene. In my constituency, I have experienced all the issues that she and other hon. Members have described. In fact, my experience almost equals the points she made. We have to deal with BT’s service team, which is quite a challenge. When it comes to faults and repairs, we phone them and then we phone again. They tell us that they have been out so we phone the constituent, and he tells us, “No, they haven’t been out.” Then we have to phone BT again to ask, “When were they out and what did they do?” That goes on ad infinitum. It is a real problem.

BT is one of the nation’s most popular service providers. It has a competitive advantage as it was born out of the longest established communications provider in the country, yet in many ways it is just as bad as the rest of the pack when it comes to service standards.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

BT uses its competitive edge to try to take Sky’s customers, particularly regarding televised football. Does my hon. Friend agree it would be better if instead of—or maybe as well as—doing that, some of those millions of pounds of expenditure were diverted into improving the infrastructure, about which we have heard so many complaints this morning?

[Jim Shannon]

As always, my hon. Friend’s pertinent point gets straight to the kernel of the issue. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

In the free market of communications, of course, consumers can vote with their feet, but that is not to say the Government have no role in ensuring proper service standards that customers of any business would expect. I always try to mention statistics because they reinforce the issues that I want to underline. Statistics published on 15 December 2015 show that in the third quarter of the year Ofcom received 22 complaints about BT per 100,000 customers for landline telephone services, compared with an average for 17 per 100,000 across all other operators. It also received 35 complaints about BT broadband services per 100,000 customers, compared with an average of 22 per 100,000 customers across all operators. As the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North said, that clearly indicates the level of complaints and the discredit to BT.

Clearly BT is not up to standard on its service standards and Ofcom, as the regulator, has to do something about that, as I will mention later. To help bring about the change that is needed and deliver real competition, BT Openreach will be required to open up telegraph poles and ducts that it uses for its fibre and telecom lines. Rival providers will now be able to use the ducts and poles for their own fibre networks to connect them to homes and offices. If and when that is in place, it will be positive and will be great for competition—and it might finally push BT to get its act together. The figures on BT’s poor customer service show that it has abused its dominance for too long and, despite being aware of its poor service, it has not done enough. Indeed, many of us would say that it has done almost nothing.

The hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North referred to the call centres. I get many complaints about call centres—about their distance, communication and the time that people spend on the phone. The hon. Lady said that she spoke to three people and then went back around again. That is so often the case, and it is so frustrating.

In reply to a supplementary question on superfast broadband last Thursday, the Minister mentioned that my constituency has an 85% connection to superfast broadband. Many of the employees of small and medium-sized businesses in my constituency who work from home would like better than that, and I would like the Minister to respond to that.

Openreach is part of BT Group, but it has obligations to treat all its customers equally. Ofcom introduced that structure in 2005, and it has delivered benefits such as stronger competition. However, the evidence from Ofcom’s review shows that Openreach still has an incentive to make decisions in the interests of BT, rather than BT’s competitors, which can lead to competition problems. Perhaps the Minister could respond to that point because it is important. Ofcom’s duty is to look after the customer, but we are not sure whether Openreach is doing that in a very balanced way.

To achieve better customer service, Ofcom has outlined the ways in which it will regulate Openreach and BT to ensure better service standards. It says:

“First, Openreach will be subject to tougher, minimum requirements to repair faults and install new lines more quickly.”

Well, we need that today; if Openreach did nothing else but that, it would be a step forward. Ofcom continues:

“These will build on measures introduced by Ofcom in 2014, but will set…minimum standards and extend to other aspects of performance, such as how often faults occur. Second, Ofcom will introduce performance tables on quality of service, identifying the best and worst operators on a range of performance measures so that customers can shop around with confidence.”

In the background information we received, Ofcom said that it wants customers to be automatically compensated for service failures, that it is setting tough minimum standards for network performance, and that it will report on which are the best and worse phone and internet providers. It is good to do all those things, but I would like a response to all those points.

Ofcom intends to introduce “automatic compensation” when things go wrong. It says:

“Broadband, landline and mobile customers will no longer have to seek redress themselves, but will instead receive refunds automatically for any loss or reduction of service.”

That is good news.

Ofcom is to come back later this year with the finalised plans of how to implement the proposals and, although it is long overdue, constituents across the whole of Strangford, the whole of Northern Ireland, the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and, indeed, my own office—we regularly phone BT about problems—will take comfort in this after having issues with BT for some years now.

I await this issue coming back before us with Ofcom’s proposals on how to implement its recommendations. It is good to have such recommendations but we need an implementation procedure. I remain encouraged to see greater consideration given to the largest communications provider in the country, and I look forward to building on today’s positives.