ValueIreland.com

With all the commentary recently about the price differential between southern and northern Ireland, I thought I’d republish a section of a post I originally wrote back in July when this issue was raised following a pointless survey carried out by the National Consumer Agency that told us that the Pope was indeed Catholic.

At the time, I had a few of observations, that are still relevant today. My main interest was to investigate whether or not businesses were actually being honest when they tell us that the price differences are due to the higher costs of doing business in Ireland, and not their naked profiteering greed.

On the same day as the NCA released their research results, it was revealed by the CSO that an average basket of goods costs 5% more in Dublin than it does in the rest of the country. All of the Northern based supermarkets chosen for this current research can easily be described as “country based” – Newry, Enniskillen and Banbridge. Yet all the supermarkets visited down here were Dublin based. I guess it’s reasonable to assume that a similar city (Belfast) vs country divide is just as applicable up there as it is down here. So, let’s assume we add 5% to the northern prices so that we’re comparing like (city = Belfast) with like (city = Dublin) – the “headline” figures from the National Consumer Agency now drop by 5%.

Now, let’s look at the price of wages down here compared to Northern Ireland. There’s no mention of this comparison of this in the National Consumer Agency report. Lets assume that the majority of employees in these stores on a fulltime basis are aged 22 and over. The minimum hourly wage in Ireland is, as of July 2007, €8.65 per hour. The equivalent national minimum wage in Northern Ireland is £5.52 per hour. That’s a Euro equivalent of €6.99. Therefore the cost of labour in Ireland is 24% more expensive than it is in Northern Ireland. I guess that’d be a good reason for things to be more expensive down here than up there.

What about the price of property – to either buy or rent? Do you think the cost of having a retail premises in Finglas, Blanchardstown or Rathfarnham is equivalent to having one in Banbridge, Enniskillen or Newry? If we look at house prices, which everyone is familiar with – a 4 bed, 2 bath detached house with garage in Newry would cost you upwards on €650k while a similar type house in Rathfarnham would cost you double that. A recent CBRE survey on the cost of renting office property showed that Belfast had a rate of €304 per sq metre, while Dublin had a rate of over twice that amount at $860 per sq metre. And on top of that, our comparison shops up north are based in areas there are probably even cheaper to rent – and all in a market where rental rates are falling in the north, while they’re pretty stable down here, over the past 12 months. Again, a legitimate reason for prices to be more expensive down here.

However, we also know that Irish shoppers are more strongly tied to branded items than many of our European neighbours, and as such, we will naturally pay a premium for wanting these branded items. But that’s our choice – we’re not forced to buy these items, but we like them and we chose to.

Irish based retailers will claim that the cost of doing business in Ireland is what causes the price differential we all know and see. While not trying to become an advocate for these businesses, I think that above 3 examples show how this can be somewhat justified.

I’ve written so many times before about this whole euro sterling pricing differential, and each time my message is the same – no matter what retailers or regulators or governments are telling us, the one main factor that will in the long term influence the prices is the shopping behaviour we ourselves follow.

If you think something is expensively overpriced, then don’t buy it. Tell your friends so that they don’t buy it. When that shop suffers a drop in sales, they’ll either drop their prices, or close down. It’s only consumer action that can cause that to happen - or not happen as was the case for the past few years.

Fair play to Conor Pope from PriceWatch in the Irish Times. Following from his article about our  SayNoTo1890.com site and geographical alternative phone numbers, the National Consumer Agency have now provided an 01 alternative to their 1890 number.

Hats off to the National Consumer Agency for its speedy response to our piece pointing out that calling its 1890 helpline from a mobile could cost people a lot more than they bargained for.

While calling the 1890 432 432 number from a landline costs five cent a minute at peak times, calling from a mobile can cost 35 cent. Last week, the agency organised a landline number in addition to its 1890 number and both will feed directly into its call centre. The landline contact number is 01-4025555 and it should be up and running from this week.

By providing this number, anyone who now needs to call the NCA, particularly from a mobile phone, will save themselves upwards of 35c per minute by having the calls subtracted from their minutes bundles rather than being charged extra calling the 1890 number.

It’s a week or so now when there were a number 0f calls to Joe Duffy about management company issues. You can find a lot of similar sentiments raised on the Management Company forum on AskAboutMoney.com - problems with with management companies and management agents. The National Consumer Agency have even provided a website that you can reference to find out more.

However, the key question with regards to all of this is:

Are you and your fellow residents in control of your management company - has it been handed over by the developer to the residents?

Yes, we are

If you are in control of your management company, then happy days - you have full control over what your management fees will be and who your management agent is and what they should be doing for you as residents. In fact, if you’re in charge of your management company, you could even decide that you don’t need management agents if you can get a strong enough group of people to carry out the agents tasks instead. You could simply change your management agents to another company if you’re not happy.

No, we’re not

Then tough! It’s most likely that you have no control at all. If the developer of your estate is still in charge of the estate, and therefore the management company, you’re most likely going to be outvoted at any management company AGMs. Like where I live, the developer maintains a block vote that will always outvote the wishes of the residents - even if every resident did show up to an AGM and voted together.
Even getting rid of the management agents in this scenario is likely to be impossible. Chances are, as in the case of where I’m living, the management agent and the developers that are in control of the management company are very closely tied together. One would never agree to the other being changed.

Holding back on management fee payments isn’t really an option either - your contract to purchase your home includes a clause that you’ll continue paying whatever management fee is charged.

So, what can you do?

If you’re in control of your management company, you can pretty much do what you like.

If you’re not, then you’re pretty much at the mercy of the developers and their management agent buddies.

Not sure I can even promise to watch Buyer Beware! again this evening at 8.30pm on RTE1. It won’t be creamy pints distracting me this week though. I’ll be attending some consumer affairs related meetings following on from the bombshell this morning that one third of the Consumer Association of Ireland directors Executive have resigned.

Check out the RTE1 website here to see what they might be covering this week. At the time of writing, it hasn’t yet been updated. The best I can find is from their programme guide:

Consumer affairs series. A company which claims to have the best interests of children at heart is found to be offering dangerous drugs advice.

They’re still not covering anything that’s appearing in the top in the top listing of consumer complaints to the NCA. Nor have they covered anything to do with the systematic theft of money from consumers by some of Irelands biggest companies.

Let us know back here if you have any feedback on this evenings show.

Regular readers are probably aware that I’m not a big fan of the actions of the National Consumer Agency. And though it might have been expected, you haven’t seem me dancing in the streets with the news that the NCA would be no more following the 2009 budget announcement that the NCA would be merged with the Competition Authority.

Apart from a comment about the proposal on my original budget post, I haven’t really approached this subject.

There’s not a whole lot for me to say really, having thought about it since the original announcement. I absolutely believe that we need an organisation such as the National Consumer Agency to protect the interests of Irish consumers, but not operated in the way this organisation is.

The NCA has at least 60 different pieces of consumer legislation at their disposal under which they can protect consumers, yet during 2007 when they received at least 2,250 complaints regarding suspected legislation breaches, there were only the following prosecutions:

• Failure to display price of grocery product - 3
• Failure to display prices in a public house - 3
• Failure to display price of petrol - 6
• Other fines imposed - 4
• Prohibition Orders - 3
• Oh, and don’t forget the classic “undertakings” - there was 1 of those.

That’s less than a 1% prosecution rate - hardly “putting the consumer first”.

And what does it take to achieve this 1% prosecution rate - according to the NCA 2007 Annual Report:

The Agency employed 59 staff, of which 55 were civil servants on secondment from the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, 3 were on secondment from Forfás and 1 is a member of staff of the Agency.

And at a cost to the tax payer of:

State funding was provided through the Office of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and amounted to €5,369,331 for the period ended 31December 2007.

We do need a National Consumer Agency - and possibly we need it to be independent and for it to not be merged with the Competition Authority - but for an organisation that claims to be “putting consumers first” it needs to do a whole lot more and to be a whole lot more effective before we can feel in any way protected.

The temptation, and subsequent reality, of some creamy pints of Guinness on Thursday evening prevented me from watching the 2^nd episode of Buyer Beware on RTE1.

And unfortunately, this isn’t one of the programmes that RTE allows you catch up on by providing it online. However, based on the topic of bogus modelling agencies, the following Top Tips might be of use to those who may be targeted by such scams.

Did anyone see the programme? Any comments?

As a matter of interest, I was doing some recent research where I was reading through the 2007 Annual Report for the National Consumer Agency. Page 52 of the report shows the top 6 reasons for complaints and information requests to the NCA (78,000 in total during 2007). So far, none of the 4 items covered in Buyer Beware! appear in the top 6 problems for Irish consumers.

Just a few short points for the weekend.

• ECB Bonus Money - Following our comments last week regarding what you could do with your ECB interest rate windfall, the Irish Times Business blog proposes that you should really be thinking about putting the extra cash against your mortgage and thereby reducing the term. Given an Irish Independent story on Friday that says the cost of lending on credit cards on personal loans will be increasing as banks scramble to keep making money, we’d actually suggest that you reduce higher cost borrowings first (such as credit cards and loans) before paying off the cheaper borrowing that is your mortgage.

• Clocked Cars - Earlier this week, the Irish Independent provided some coverage on the AA research that found that upwards of 10000 imported 2nd hand cars may have been clocked before being sold to Irish customers. We’ve covered car clocking here a few times before, and have criticised the National Consumer Agency policy of not prosecuting those caught doing so. Check out our Top Tips on how to check if the car you’re thinking of buying may be clocked. This subsequent Independent article indicates though that like everything else in the world, clocking cars is becoming more technically advanced – but most of our Top Tips will still help you identify other tell-tale signs that a car might be clocked.

• A Short Rant - Why do so few people have the courtesy to respond to phone and e-mail queries these days. If I were to stand in front of you to ask you the same question, would you still ignore me? I’m talking about sales inquiries to businesses, queries to customer service departments, calls and e-mails to work colleagues, contacts and acquaintances, or just general responses to e-mails, phone calls or written communications. I may just work to a different standard, but as much as possible, I respond to anything I get within the day, and if I can’t I will still respond saying I can’t respond, and confirming when I will. Is that so hard? Am I asking too much?

• Price of Petrol - I noticed this morning that petrol in Tesco in Clearwater in Finglas was 105.6c per litre. Just think – if the government hadn’t added 8c per litre to the cost of petrol in the budget, we’d now be back down below the €1 per litre for the first time in a few of years – April or May 2005. The NCA are investigating petrol prices at the moment because we’re told that Irish petrol prices are 20% higher than the rest of Europe. The budget increase of 8c at the moment represents 8% of the price, or nearly half of the 20%. Will the government appointed National Consumer Agency rightly associate most of the price difference reason to government taxation, or will we get some other reasons? Or will they shy away from criticising their masters?

• And Finally - No Frills Shouldn’t mean no standards? An interesting article from the Cork Southern Star newspaper detailing a range of issues with Ryanair.
  

Have a great weekend!

That’s about the sum total of my thoughts on Budget 2009 from Brian Lenihan. Lots of messing around here and there, but nothing that really stands out as addressing the causes, or resolving the impact, of the problems that we’re faced with.