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bjbj (Intro Chime) We also wonder whether this is something where the regulator actually
needs more powers of intervention when it becomes evidence that companies are not meeting
their obligations under the code of practice. To give you an example, from a different industry
in the UK, energy will illustrate the sort of thing I've got in mind. When full competition
was introduce today energy in the UK, one of the things that companies increased their
market share was sent people around to do doorstep selling. So you get a knock on your
door. Somebody would say, "Would you like to switch your energy supplier?" To which
you would say, "No, I want to go and cook my dinner, please." And then in the initial
phase, they'd say, OK, that's fine. "Could you just sign this piece of paper to say I've
visited you and I'm meeting my targets." And people would sign it. And then discovered
that they'd switched their energy supplier. And this became a big deal. And eventually,
the regulator knocked heads together and got the energy companies to sign up to an agreed
code of practice and it was a condition. And signing up to this code of practice was added
to the condition of the licence of the energy companies. And then the regulator was able,
in a couple of cases, to take enforcement action against companies which aren't complied
with the code of practice and actually fined them significant amounts of money for failing
to comply with the obligations. And it looks to me that you need a system where that threat
is actually a real one if you've got companies who are not complying with the obligations
for complaint handling, or indeed, customer protection. And looks as well that probably
there needs to be a bit more oversight of the obligations. And I just say that... historically,
what happens with self regulatory systems is that when they don't deliver what they
promise, governments step in and increase oversight, increase regulation. This looks
like it might work, certainly as an election issue. I gather that that is on the horizon
as well! So I'll just end, really end there, but just reiterate the last bullet point on
the slide, which is really that the devil is in the detail with all complaint handling
systems and customer service. It's not simply getting people to accept high level principles
to actually what you put in the rules and how you implement them. That's important.
And thank you for listening to me today. APPLAUSE [Content_Types].xml Iw}, $yi} _rels/.rels
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