Irish consumers who may have been overcharged by premium rate telephone service providers will find it more difficult to seek redress once a new communications bill becomes law, the chairman of RegTel has announced.
RegTel’s chairman Mr Fred Hayden expressed concern at the manner in which the Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan had introduced the Communications Regulation (Premium Rate Services) Bill 2009.
The Bill proposes an end to self-regulation by the telecoms industry, and instead in the future will be supervised by ComReg. Similar to the UK premium rate phone regulator Phonepayplus, it proposes substantial fines for abuses by premium rate phone companies operators who provide such services as ringtones, wallpapers, chatlines, competitions and information services.
“It is the Minister’s prerogative to bring about a reorganisation and legislative changes. But in the process the minister has failed to listen to the board and staff of RegTel who have direct experience of regulating a difficult sector for the past 15 years,” Mr Hayden said.
He said the new Bill “does not include the power to order refunds in cases of wrongdoing, a power that RegTel now exercises, thereby providing a powerful means of deterring wrongdoing by service providers”.
He accepted that the new legislation, which enters its committee stage next week does include new powerful sanctions to deal with unauthorised telephone services. However, he pointed out that they failed to provide any redress for Irish consumers.
Mr Hayden said that in RegTel’s experience, the aggrieved consumer “wants a refund now rather than fines on offenders sometime in the future”.
Under the Bill, premium rate telephone service providers will require a licence. If the specified conditions are not met, the licence can be amended, suspended or revoked by ComReg.
Over the past few years a number of premium rate telephone service providers have been accused of taking advantage of vulnerable groups who have spent large sums of money after inadvertently subscribing to expensive mobile phone services.
Mobile subscription services continue to generate most complaints, making up 91 per cent of calls received. In the report, the regulator Pat Breen blamed some of this on a few premium rate telephone service providers acting in breach of RegTels Code of Practice, but also draws attention to consumer not checking the terms and conditions when signing up for such a premium rate telephone service.
Since 1999 €460,000 in refunds has been paid to consumers via RegTel.