Topics of focus - 2023
Topic: Social Tariffs - focusing on consumers awareness including how they navigate the market, their understanding and experience of using them, and whether the tariffs meet their needs.
The Panel’s National Stakeholder Hubs in October took the form of an All-UK Hub and participants joined from all four nations of the UK - England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We wanted to explore the needs of financially compromised consumers in the telecommunications sector and to understand how to improve social tariff accessibility, and whether consumers had any unmet needs.
Click here to read a summary of our discussions across the UK and see who took part.
Topic: The Struggle for Fairness: the experience of consumers, citizens and micro-businesses in remote and rural locations in the UK.
The Panel’s National Stakeholder Hubs recently focussed on consumers, citizens and micro-businesses who live and work in rural and remote communities and how they access and experience communications services, such as landline, broadband, mobile, Pay-TV and postal services, in all four nations of the UK.
Click here to read a summary of our discussions across the UK and see who took part.
Topic: Developing a Minimum Digital Living Standard for UK households - and the impacts of the cost of living crisis on consumers living across the UK.
Representatives of the University of Liverpool, Good Things Foundation and Welsh Government presented to Hub participants and discussed the work that it's been pioneering to develop a Minimum Digital Living Standard for UK households, and understand the minimum basic basket of digital goods, services and skills that different household types in different parts of the UK require to participate in a digital world. Which? also presented the key findings from its latest research on the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis on consumers across the UK.
Click here to read a summary of our discussions across the UK and see who took part.
Topic: Reflecting on our engagement and impacts over the past year and looking forward to consider the top issues facing communications consumers in the year ahead.
Participants reflected on the Panel’s National Hubs with stakeholders who attend the Hubs and represent the interests of consumers, citizens and micro-businesses; and shared the top communications issues facing the consumers they represent in the year ahead.
The top communications issues facing the consumers, citizens and micro-businesses that our stakeholders represent in the year ahead:
- Digital exclusion – ensuring that people can access digital services and are armed with the digital skills required to participate safely online to help secure equality of opportunity and tackle social exclusion.
- Affordability and consumer debt – making sure that consumers who are struggling financially can continue to engage digitally and not face exclusion.
- Migration to VoIP – ensuring that consumers, particularly people who live in rural areas and have additional support requirements such as telecare users are aware of the upcoming changes and safeguarded throughout the switchover.
- 2G/3G switch-off – ensuring that consumers are safeguarded from potential impacts of the switch-off, especially people living in rural areas.
- Postal services – retaining and delivering reliable postal services for citizens across the UK at an affordable cost.
- Network resilience – understanding the consumer impacts of network outages and ensuring that consumers particularly those at higher risk of detriment, have sufficient resilience solutions in place in the event of an outage.
- Support for consumers with additional access requirements – ensuring that consumers with access and/or additional support requirements have equivalent access to communications services and are aware of the support available to them.
- Embedding equality and diversity in the communications sector – making sure that a diverse range of people are represented across the sector, and services and products are designed inclusively to meet a range of consumer requirements.
- Decarbonisation in the communications sector – implementing more sustainable working practices across the communications sector and giving consumers the choice to make more carbon friendly decisions.
- Online safety – ensuring that people who wish to engage online are able to do so safely and are protected from harmful content online.
Click here to read a summary of our discussions across the UK and see who took part.