If your phone is not working properly, sometimes you are the last to know.  I usually write about other people, but this story is personal.

My father is 92 years old and lives in sheltered accommodation in the borough of Lewisham.  Some eight weeks ago I realised that his telephone service was not working properly.

I consequently phoned his service provider but I was unable to give the password, account number, etc. (I am not the person who set up his telephone service.)  The service provider told me that they could not do anything about repairing the problem. The company quoted the Data Protection Act etc. as the reason why they cannot help in this way and I have made at least four subsequent calls with the same answer, while my elderly father continues to have the same telephone issues.

This and other situations that have arisen worried me to the point where I telephoned Ofcom (tel: 0300 123 3000 or 020 7981 3000), who said they would pursue my dad’s predicament (and did get the service provider to sort the problem eventually), but they also told me that any statutory change in the law would have nothing to do with them.  I needed to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office who told me that they could not help me either.  They referred me to their explanation of the Data Protection Act, which I have read through, and they also inferred that the telephone service providers are now often interpreting this law to make it really hard for ‘the man in the street’ to do something that they were able to do quite easily in the days when there was one telephone company.

From what I can see the Data Protection Act is in existence to prevent the passing of personal or sensitive information from one company, organisation, or person to another.  I am having trouble working out how asking the appropriate service provider to repair one of their own clients’ phones, if it is broken, provokes the passing on of any information. The company would already have the relevant information and provided the person with the defective phone has paid their bill and not expressly asked that their phone appears out of order, there is little reason not to make sure anyone’s phone is working regardless of who reports it.

Many people, irrespective of age, would not know that their phone was out of order for days at a time.  It can be argued that people of working age often use mobiles and tend to have their ‘telephone packages’ in place for broadband and cable/satellite TV purposes, rather than for the landline phone, while vulnerable people like my father depend upon it so that other people can make telephone calls to them and consequently days can go by before they are even aware that their telephones are out of order.

So I have now written to Lewisham MPs with a view to getting the law changed so that...

As long as the subscriber’s account is up-to-date, their service provider has to take on board calls regarding defects, regardless of who makes the call and either...

1, fix the fault if this can be done for free

or

2, make reasonable efforts to contact the service user, by whatever method, to inform them of the fault and of any charge that needs to be paid

and

There should at least be a register of vulnerable telephone subscribers whose faulty phones can be dealt with in this way irrespective of which service provider is involved.

A chance to make an impact!

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