Ofcom’s advice hub puts £100 a year on being out of contract
Ofcom has launched a Consumer Hub, one address for its advice on switching, complaining and getting a communications bill down, and it has published a figure alongside it. Households who take broadband, landline and pay TV from the same company and have drifted out of contract could save over £100 a year by switching, the regulator says.
The arithmetic is in Ofcom’s own notes. Out of contract customers on a bundled pay TV, broadband and landline package pay £78 a month on average, against £69 for customers still inside a contract. Nine pounds. That is where the £100 comes from. The same Pricing Trends report, published in February, found that one in three of these triple play customers were out of contract last year.
What the hub actually is
It sits at ofcom.org.uk/onyourside and gathers money saving tips, help with common faults, a free checker for what broadband an address can get, a mobile coverage tool and the routes to complain when a provider will not put something right. None of it is new policy. The regulator has collected advice it had already published into one place, which is a smaller thing than a launch sounds, and a useful one if you have ever tried to find Ofcom’s guidance on price rises from a standing start.
The switching advice leans on One Touch Switching, which is two years old today and means you only speak to the provider you are moving to. Ofcom says more than 300 providers are signed up to it. Mobile is still a text message: PAC to 65075, with no call to your current network.
What the £100 does not tell you
It is an average, not a quote for your house. It describes triple play customers, the ones buying broadband, landline and television from a single company, and it sets two averages against each other rather than promising what any one person would get back. If you buy broadband on its own, the figure does not describe you at all, and your own gap could be wider or narrower than nine pounds.
What it does put a price on is inertia. Ofcom’s affordability tracker, published in May, has 4% of telecoms customers missing a payment in the previous quarter and 7% cancelling a service altogether, so the households most exposed to a contract quietly rolling on are often the ones least able to absorb it.
If your own contract has run out, our guide to out of contract broadband covers what to check before you do anything, and switching broadband and TV deals with the bundle case, which is the one this figure is about. We covered the switching numbers themselves yesterday. To see which networks actually sell to your street, start at the availability checker.