Ofcom faces increased pressure to expand automatic compensation

The British Chamber of Commerce, Federation of Small Businesses, and Institute of Directors are effectively jumping on the coat-tails of business fibre provider Vorboss, which earlier this year initiated this call. It lobbied Ofcom to extend the automatic compensation scheme already in place for consumers of UK fixed-line communications services to businesses.

“We are writing to you to express our collective support for an automatic compensation scheme for fixed business connectivity,” opens the joint letter. “We all want to play a part in helping the UK economy to grow, but connectivity outages are impacting this ambition. Recent research commissioned by Vorboss identified that more than half of UK fixed business connectivity customers experienced one or more outages in the past year. As a result, the UK economy lost approximately £17.6 billion in economic output over the same time period.”

It goes on to report that the majority of businesses affected received no compensation. Inevitably it focuses on the incentive automatic compensation will provide for CSPs to raise their game, rather than the handy cash it promises for their members. If, as is implied by this campaign, there is very little consumer protection for UK businesses (which presumably gets less the smaller the business), then that does need looking at.

“It’s clear from the responses of the biggest business internet providers that compensation is anything but automatic,” said Vorboss Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, James Fredrickson. “Hiding behind compensating on a ‘case-by-case’ basis is exactly what Ofcom needs to put a stop to.

“For those that do pursue compensation, the typical payout is hardly worth the effort. Standard business internet tariffs today would offer only £7.53 per hour of outage in compensation – about the price of a pint of craft beer in a London pub – for outages costing a typical London business more than £18,000 in productivity a year.”

He’d be lucky to get a beer for even that little in London, as it strides ominously towards the eight quid pint, but the point is well made. As we wrote previously, it’s hard to see why a tranche of commercial rights deemed essential for consumers should not equally apply to businesses. That alone should be reason enough for Ofcom to act on this campaign, if it can find a window in its busy censorship agenda, or at the very least explain why it regulates so selectively.