ValueIreland.com

If anyone was in any doubt about it, here’s a perfect example of why Irish consumers are suffering under the weight of a huge number of useless regulators in this country.

Last week, the Irish Independent has an article entitled “Watchdog: ‘rates should be displayed’.

At a time when the banks were slowly but surely flushing themselves down the toilet, the Financial Regulator conducted a mystery shopper exercise on 100 foreign exchange outlets to ensure they were observing the rules regarding the display commission levels and exchange rates.

And the result of this exercise? They found that some of the providers weren’t following the rules.

And the response of the useless Financial Regulator? Did they prosecute them for not following the rules? Fines? Closure orders? Name and Shame?

Nope. A Press Release that essentially tells us nothing! Useless or what?

I could go on about my conspiracy theory regarding this whole pork recall issue (you’re not worried about the bank bailouts or the recession now, are you?), but lets for the moment stick to the facts.

• From a regulatory perspective, I think this editorial piece from the Irish Independent was pretty much on the money. We have 4 watchdog bodies involved in this - yet it still took a week for the matter to come to a head, and we couldn’t even do the testing necessary in Ireland.
• From a value for money perspective issue, why did the “from farm to fork” food tracing process not allow the supermarkets and suppliers isolate the 10% at risk product and allow the other 90% to remain on the shelves. Does this mean that the expense of implenting this tracing regime is all for nought now?
• From a consumer perspective, you are entitled to refunds if you can prove purchase. As the pork purchased isn’t “fit for purpose”, you’re entitled to “repair, replace or refund”. Any of the three resolutions are perfectly legitimate on the part of the shop where you bought your pork. Generally, proof of purchase (a receipt) isn’t always necessary, but this is probably considered a special scenario. If you have own-branded items its easy for them to identify that you bought the product in a certain store. If it’s a branded item, to be fair to the stores, you should have proof or purchase. If you have your receipts, you should have no problems.
• So, though we’re told it’s safe to throw your pork products in the normal rubbish - you shouldn’t. Try first and get your money back. If that’s unsuccessful, then throw it out.
• Here are two useful Frequently Asked Questions pieces in The Irish Times and The Irish Independent that will help you further.
• Finally, for the ultimate source of information on what’s going on, go to the Food Safety Authority website. If you’re calling from a mobile, don’t call their 1890 33 66 77 number. Save yourself a few quid (since you’re likely to be on hold for a while) and call their 01 817 1300 number instead.
  

A few consumer news points for you for the weekend:

• Busy busy week for ValueIreland.com and particularly our Overcharging in Ireland, Check Your Bills, and SayNoTo1890.com initiatives. Following an appearance in the Irish Times on Saturday, there was Pricewatch in the Irish Times on Monday, and the Irish Examiner on Tuesday. There was also George Hook on Monday evening, TV3 on Wednesday morning as well as Radio Kerry and C103 in Cork. Finally, there was Q102 on Friday evening.

• “Go Local” Campaign - We’ve talked many times about buying Irish here in the past month or so. We’re now coming to the end of a week long “go local” campaign led by community organisations across the country - the IFA, the churches, the vintners and the GAA. Did you see any of this campaign in your region? Did it cause you to change your normal buying habits?

• Financial Services Ombudsman complaints – During the week, the Financial services Ombudsman announced that complaints to his office had increased 28% in 2008. 21 example complaints were provided – where 11 were upheld and 10 rejected. Wouldn’t it be nice to have seen who the complaints were made against – particularly where complaints were upheld? A bit of name and shame wouldn’t go astray. Tell us consumers who’s been bad and we can choose better where we can put our business.

• Annual Travel Pass Cost Increases – Lots of comments at work these days where colleagues are suffering from up to 25% increases in their yearly train travel passes – despite possible service cutbacks. I was in Pearse and saw the great incentives from Iaranrod Eireann to entice customers to apply for even these more expensive annual pass tickets. Assuming you just wanted a single or return somewhere, there was only 1 out of a ridiculously insufficient 3 ticket machines working, and it looked like the queue for the ticket kiosk was winding out onto the street it was moving so slowly. And with all that, there were no trains running!
• I received an e-mail this week promoting an apparent new EU consumer awareness campaign - Is It Fair? The e-mail I received had all the hallmarks of being a spam message, though the site looks legitimate upon first viewing. I’ll be following up more on this after I (hopefully) receive a response from whomever sent me the e-mail in the first place.

• I’ve meant to write about this before, but if you’re ever around the Kildare Street / Molesworth Street area and need a coffee and sandwich, then make sure you avoid the BusyBean Cafe on Molesworth Street and head straight for the Petit Cafe Food Co. on Kildare Street. Apart from the food and coffee being a whole lot nicer, the service is unbelieveably better - a pleasure to go there.

Don’t forget that Philip Boucher-Hayes is on again tonight on RTE1 at 8.30pm with the 4th in his Buyer Beware! series. According to the RTE schedule, this is the sparce detail of what tonights show is about:

Consumer series in which Philip Boucher Hayes investigates companies and individuals who have left customers feeling dissatisfied.

I did manage to watch the full programme last week. In case you missed it, this is what was covered:

The feature story in Episode 3 of Buyer Beware! looks at the activities of a British-based company Community Concepts which has approached Irish businesses for money which, it claimed, would go to publish a drug awareness booklet for Irish schools. And, as we come into the Christmas shopping season, the second item examines the burgeoning phenomenon of online shopping, and looks at some do’s and don’ts for purchasers in the light of some cautionary tales.

To be honest, I found the programme quite disappointing. While there was probably some entertainment value in watching the presenter chasing around a dodgy geezer in the UK, its all a little bit abstract and a little bit irrelevant to Irish consumers.

Wouldn’t it be much more interesting and relevant if Philip was chasing Brian Goggin of Bank of Ireland or Eugene Sheehy of AIB around their housing estate (or leafy suburban roads) trying to find answers as to why they rip off Irish consumers so much, or chasing the Financial Regulator Pat Neary around and around the Central Bank on Dame Street trying to find out why he lets them away with it all the time.

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.

Not sure how much of a big deal this is given my low regard for the Financial Regulator, but did you know that the Financial Regulator Consumer Panel hasn’t sat since the end of September?

So throughout the Irish and global financial crisis that we’re experiencing at the moment, and the massive decision being taken by the government in the form of the bank bailout, it appears that the Financial Regulator isn’t consulting with consumers at all - ignoring them in effect.

According to the IFSRA website, this is what the Consumer Panel is for, and what it’s not doing at the moment:

• monitoring the performance by the Financial Regulator of its functions and responsibilities under this Act
• providing the Financial Regulator with comments with respect to the performance of its functions and responsibilities
• providing the Financial Regulator with comments and suggestions with respect to the performance of the financial services industry
• when requested to comment on policy and regulatory documents issued, or to be issued, by the Financial Regulator

As it happens, we didn’t have a Financial Services Ombudsman Council sitting for a period during that time as well - from the middle to the end of October.

As of today, we still don’t have a Financial Regulator Consumer Panel in place yet, so consumers can still go whistle as far as at least one of our Regulators is concerned.

Last week saw a further incidence of a financial institution losing client information, this time on a USB memory stick. This time, Bank of Ireland lost the bank account numbers, first line of address and contact details of nearly 1000 clients.

Hands up how many amongst you have their own personal sensitive details on a USB sticks like that and then carried it around with you in public? How many of you are careless enough to lose the USB sticks that you carry around with you?

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that we consumers can do about the clowns that work in the financial institutions and other organisations that are losing our data at an increasingly alarming frequency. Well, apart from hoping that the Data Protection Commissioner will do a little better than the National Consumer Agency, ComReg or IFSRA at being a regulator.

Inspired by these growing number of personal data loses, we’ve put together a set of Top Tips that we consumers can follow to make sure that we at least do everything we can do to protect our own personal data and identity. Click here for more.

1. Why am I being charged so much, and who keeps allowing the suppliers increase their prices?
2. Why isn’t there any competition in the gas or electricity markets?

It’s nearly 4 years now since the electricity market was deregulated for domestic electricity supply. And unfortunately, there’s still no competition for the ESB - our research done in 2005 is still valid today with very little need for updates (unfortunately).