Warrington MP Asks £246K Compensation for Slow Residential Broadband

The MP for Warrington North (Cheshire, England), Helen Jones, has claimed that many residents in the area should be paid a total of £246,000 in compensation by ISPs because of the slow broadband speeds that local homes are alleged to endure. She wants Ofcom to take action.

According to the Warrington Guardian, local residents are owned the money because of “poor broadband speeds” and this apparently stems from an Ofcom report, which allegedly “revealed that a total of £246,000 in compensation to constituents” could be due and that’s partly because “the rolling out of fibre optic broadband in areas including Burtonwood, Winwick, Culcheth and Croft has been ‘slow’.”

Helen Jones, Warrington North MP, said:

“Discussions I have had with service providers over the years has resulted in some progress but the position is still far from satisfactory.

Less than half of all UK broadband connections are superfast, calling into question the government target to provide super-fast speeds to 95 per cent of all UK premises by the end of this year.

That is why I’m supporting the call by the [cross-party] British Infrastructure Group of MPs to introduce a comprehensive automatic compensation scheme that allows customers to be refunded for receiving unreasonably slow broadband download speeds.

Millions of properties across the country fail to meet the proposed minimum download speed of 10mb/s and could be eligible for receiving compensation from their providers.”

As usual there are a few problems with this claim and the approach being suggested. Firstly, the figure of £246K does not appear to come from Ofcom. Instead it looks more likely to be derived from either the MP or newspaper’s own interpretation of data from the regulator’s consultation on a new Automatic Compensation System (here), except that consultation was based on compensating for a total loss of service and not slow speeds.

Elsewhere Helen’s second paragraph makes the mistake of conflating the results from broadband speed testing with the separate aspect of network availability. Put another way, around 55% of the UK still connects via a slow pure copper based ADSL broadband line and that’s despite “superfast broadband” networks (e.g. FTTC / DOCSIS / FTTP etc.) being estimated to cover around 92% of the country.

The choice of connectivity solution that consumers make may thus have been overlooked or not given enough weight in the £246,000 figure above, although it’s difficult to know without further clarification of what that total truly represents and precisely where it comes from.

Mind you the idea of compensating for slow speeds isn’t entirely without merit, although in today’s market it would be very difficult to deliver. Identifying responsibility for slow broadband speeds, which can also be caused by things like weak WiFi, poor home wiring or even remote Internet services (plus a plethora of other factors that may be outside of an ISPs ability to control), is not a simple task.

On top of that the Government and local authorities would also need to take some responsibility for ensuring that everybody can actually access a truly superfast and reliable connection in the first place (particularly relevant for the final c.30% of UK premises where public investment is usually required to deliver an upgrade), which is yet to be achieved. Consumer prices would also need to rise in order to cover the costs of such a system.

It’s worth pointing out that Ofcom’s Code of Practice for Broadband Speeds, which is sadly voluntary and doesn’t apply to all providers, allows you to exit your contract penalty free if your service speeds suffer a significant decline.