Clause 116 - Conditions regulation premium rate services
Communications Bill
6:00 pm
Mr Richard Allan (Sheffield, Hallam, Liberal Democrat)
I rise to support strongly the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Ryedale. Many of my concerns about premium rate services are in precisely the area of promotion that he mentioned. When the first premium rate numbers were published, there was a big fuss about people running up huge phone bills. ICSTIS was born out of that process and has done a good job regulating the straightforward premium rate numbers with which everyone is now familiar. It works well.
What is more insidious and dangerous is the way in which people disguise the use of such numbers. The ones that really irritate me are the fax-back services that say in very small letters at the bottom of the page that calls are premium rate. They do not make that fact obvious and use devious and appalling psychological techniques to try to get people to use them. Some of the worst of them that I have seen say things such as, ''An animal will die if you do not fax this back now to vote on this issue.'' That kind of statement really gets to people—[Interruption.] I will not be drawn on that. They will use that kind of technique and the people who fax them back will end up paying £2 or £3 for the privilege of having done so. That technique is appalling, as is the fact that they hide the costs in very small print at the bottom—that is a promotion issue. Action must be taken on such matters.
I turn to the issue of what I call ''naughty diallers''—although I am unsure whether that is the correct technical term. Naughty dialling takes place on the internet, and I have seen it take place in the UK. I have a child who was using the internet; she came back to the service that she had been using, and by using a wholly innocuous service a naughty dialler that replaces one's normal internet dialler with a premium rate number that costs £1 a minute had insinuated itself on to the machine.
These things are happening now; as we speak, people are having them downloaded on to their machines. The technology for doing that and for disguising the fact that one has got someone to use the naughty dialler—naughty in an adult sense in many cases, but also naughty in the sense that it is not the internet dialler that one intended to use—is improving. People are developing these technologies.
I think that all of this subject falls into the area of promotion. At some point, someone might have clicked a box on a web page—often a disguised box that is not doing what it looks like it is doing. If one clicks on a box that says ''OK,'' that may be taken for implied consent for substituting this expensive dial up connection for one's normal dial-up connection.
We will have to run quickly to keep up with some of these changes. If someone is using devious methods but has kept to the letter of the law, Ofcom should have the flexibility to say, ''No, that was sufficiently devious for me to rule you out of order and stop that
service taking place.'' Unless the Minister can give us further assurances, I am concerned that if the amendment is not accepted some of these devious practices that occur in the area of service promotion will not be caught. That would be a great shame, and people's confidence in the use of such services—and the internet, in particular—would decrease if they did not feel that they had some kind of protection against such awful practices.