Selling regulations being breached by BT claims watchdog

A consumer campaign group has claimed recently that the communications giant BT is breaching distance selling regulations by failing to give enough rights to consumers who want to cancel their contracts.

Many people experience difficulties when trying to cancel broadband or bundle contracts, and one consumer campaign group has claimed that the communications giant BT is not giving enough rights to customers that want to cancel their contracts to the point where the company is breaching distance selling regulations. The claim has been made by consumer campaign group Which?

An experiment was carried out by the group that involved making a number of anonymous calls to BT, and officials from Which? said that the outcome of the calls showed that there were serious problems with the rights that consumers were getting when trying to cancel their broadband contracts with the provider.

BT was found to have failed to give proper information about terminating contracts in many cases as well as failing to provide information to customers on early termination charges. An official from Which? said: “We think BT is pulling a fast one by not ensuring that some customers get written notice of a cooling-off period, and we are encouraging BT to formally add appropriate cancellation rights to its contracts as soon as possible.”

However, BT stated: “BT fully complies with the EU Distance Selling Directive. We have made the Office of Fair Trading, Trading Standards and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills fully aware of how we do so. But to improve matters further we are going to introduce an early termination right for our customers so that they can cancel within the statutory period without suffering early termination charges.”

Source – V3