Call for tighter regulation of mobile phone contracts

CALLS have been made for tougher restrictions on mobile phone contracts after €106,000 in unpaid bills was recovered by telecom company O2 last month.

O2 recovered €106,000 in outstanding debts from mainly non-business users in the third week of September.

The judgments, listed in the latest edition of Stubbs Gazette, represent only about a fifth of all such cases in the State.

In some instances domestic users had outstanding bills of over €2,500.

In one judgment, a woman listed as a ‘femme sole’, legal parlance for a domestic customer, was ordered to pay O2 €3,235.22 in unpaid bills. Only five of the 59 judgments for O2 listed in Stubbs Gazette relate to business users.

Dermot Jewell, head of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, said new regulations for mobile phone contracts need to be introduced to stop consumers, especially the young, getting into huge debt.

He said the O2 figures are proof that for many people debt is unmanageable and the lax regulations around mobile phone contracts often lead to extra debt.

“Getting into a mobile phone contract is done with great ease for many people and it is easy to run up a large bill,” said Mr Jewell.

“A cap on how much a new customer can run up on their bill for the first six to nine months is one solution which has worked in other spheres of life.

“What we don’t need is young people getting bad credit ratings which will hamper them for years.”

A spokeswoman for O2 said the glut of debt cases brought by the company in mid-September did not signify a ‘crackdown’ by O2, but was instead the result of legal protocol.

According to figures from ComReg, the average mobile user in Ireland spends €624 per year on bills.

There are 4.37 million mobile phone users in Ireland, with just under a quarter of that number opting for a contract phone.

ComReg’s latest report shows that in the last audited quarter of this year mobile phone revenue was €477 million.

Among the 15-24 age group, mobile phone ownership is 95%.

Earlier this year a Europe-wide survey found that Irish mobile phone expenditure is one of the highest in the EU.