Sky UK Probed Over Contract Cancellation and Termination Gripes

Ofcom has launched an own-initiative investigation into Sky’s (Sky Broadband) compliance with their rules for governing service cancellation and terminations, which appear to have arisen following a bout of customer complaints.

At this stage the investigation (CW/01163/08/15) has no real detail behind it, except to say that the issue surrounds whether or not Sky has contravened the regulator’s General Conditions 9.3 and 22 (Details of the GC Rules).

The GC9.3 rule is designed to ensure that ISPs do not adopt conditions or procedures for contract termination that could “act as disincentives” for end-users against changing their provider, which among other things has been designed to stop the use of automatically renewing contracts.

Meanwhile GC22 is the more familiar rule for governing service migrations (switches) and home moves. Ofcom also makes a specific mention of GC22.5, which states: “When the Customer enters into a contract for the provision of Communications Services, the Gaining Provider must allow the Customer to terminate the contract from the point of sale to the completion of the Transfer Period without charge or any other form of compensation being required to be given by the Customer to the Gaining Provider.”

Related probes often take several months to complete and don’t always proceed to a full investigation. It should also be said that Sky Broadband, much like Virgin Media, tend to receive proportionally fewer complaints than their arch rivals of BT, PlusNet, EE and TalkTalk (here).