Ofcom probes transparency of telecoms price rises

Ofcom has today launched an industry-wide enforcement programme into whether in-contract price rises were set out clearly enough by phone and broadband companies before customers signed up. Having analyzed customer complaints and other preliminary evidence, Ofcom is concerned that consumers who took out contracts between 1 March 2021 and 16 June 2022 may not have been provided with sufficiently clear information about in-contract price rises, which are usually applied in March or April each year. Under its rules over that period, if a provider included potential future price rises in the terms of a contract, they had to be set out prominently and transparently at the point of sale. If the customer hadn’t agreed to those terms when signing up – because they hadn’t been made sufficiently prominent and transparent – providers should have notified them of the price increase and offered them a right to exit penalty-free. Ofcom is now investigating what happened in practice. Ofcom will collect further information from a range of providers to assess the steps they have taken to make these terms prominent and transparent.