Openreach insiders reveal pressure to levy bogus charges

Folks, what we have seen over the past 4 years with Openreach is the formation of a very comfortable and in some important respects unaccountable monopoly.  With Ofcom’s focus on equivalence of access for retail telecommunications competitors, it looks as if other legitimate concerns such as lack of infrastructure investment, dodgy business practices and gold-plating of the monopoly business have attracted less attention from the regulator.  Ofcom has frequently sold the public on the benefits of the functional separation of BT, but has been less clear about the accompanying trade-offs.  In fact, I cannot really recall Ofcom ever publicly discussing any weaknesses in its approach or things it would have done differently.  If such a discussion has occurred, I expect it was behind closed doors before the Ofcom board.

I thought the BBC Watchdog investigation on dodgy business practices at Openreach was excellent and raised some clear areas where more (or more strident) Ofcom oversight is necessary.   I thought the following (most are excerpted) comments on the BBC Watchdog’s website were among the more compelling pieces of evidence that demonstrate much more Ofcom oversight is necessary.  These comments appear to be from BT or BT Openreach personnel and show a pattern of what appear to be fraudulent business practices related to charges for external wiring near end users’ premises:

‘as a BT engineer in the [removed for legal reasons] (senior Operations Manager) [removed for legal reasons] has always told us to charge all customers where ever possible even if the we knew the charges aren’t appropriate, he always said its better to charge and have the money and then deal with the complaint.’

‘as an ex openreach engineer bt put alot of pressure on members of each team to make a certain amount of charges to the customers to increase revenue and offering incentives to the teams, if you did not hit targets on your three monthly appraisal you would have to justify on why your induvidual target of charges were not met and you would be given new targets and advice on how to meet these targets.’

‘I worked for bt/openreach for 22yrs I left in july this yr. while working for openreach as part of your job you were told by your manager you had targets to bill customers.’

‘This is part of an e-mail sent by my boss:  I require YOU to raise TRC (time related charge)if when visiting an EU’s property and working on BT plant which is to the current standard, ( i.e. DW10) at any point from the first fixing including all wiring, block terminals and sockets. Notes should be recorded “Not fair wear and tear”.  Justification we do not have to prove why the installation as gone faulty typical expectation is that a standard installation should last 30 years.  I require YOU to charge the hourly rate for ALL jobs that are not purely an unplug faulty equipment.  I require YOU to charge the appropriate stores pack on all jobs that attract the hourly rate.’

‘Further problems are due to the current aggressive BT/Openreach management style, which puts engineers under severe pressure to raise as many “TRC’s (Time Related Charges) as possible. Engineers who fail to meet their targets are harassed during regular 1:1 meetings with their line managers and threatened with being put on “Improvement Plans” etc.  When sending back job details on their laptops, some engineers who are under pressure to improve their figures, may be tempted to enter a Yes in the TRC charges box.’

‘I WORK FOR OPENREACH / BT AS A CUSTOMER SERVICE ENGINEER. OVER THE LAST THREE YEARS THERE HAS BEEN GREAT PRESSURE BY SENIOR MANAGEMENT TO CHARGE, CHARGE AND CHARGE AGAIN, THE TERM BT USES IS TRC – ‘TIME RELATED CHARGE’. NOW THE REASON FOR THIS IS OPENREACH IS A COMPANY, A VERY EXPENSIVE COMPANY.THEY HAVE ONE OF THE LARGEST FLEETS OF VANS IN EUROPE, A LARGE WORKFORCE AND PROCESS AND MANAGEMENT THAT ISNT EFFICIENT AND COSTLY AND NEEDS TO RAISE MONEY BY CHARGING TO BE IN BUSINESS.’

‘Looking a the cases on Watchdog the other night, (except for the Broadband ones) it was quite clear to me that those charges had not been raised by the Engineer but by ‘TRC Spotters’.  TRC Spotter? Well as much as BT pretend there is no such thing there is in fact a group of people hidden away in a secret location who go through closed faults to check if TRC (Time Related Charges) should have been raised.’

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So there you have it.  Once again, similar to the “up to” broadband speeds deception, consumers are not really in any position to do anything other than complain … endure some harassment … wait months … and get a small credit.  Consumers without good knowledge of what’s going on are presumably fleeced.

Stay tuned…