The boss of Britain’s advertising watchdog has vowed to “put a lid” on false delivery charge claims as he hailed the success of a recent crackdown.
Guy Parker, chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), said he was confident of getting “on top of the problem” after the regulator acted on a flurry of complaints from consumers in the north and north-east.
Online retailers who inflate delivery charges to send goods to northern Scotland have been in the spotlight since Moray MSP Richard Lochhead launched a campaign to end the practise last year.
Mr Lochhead has now handed two dossiers of evidence to the ASA, which can clamp down on firms that make misleading claims, like “free mainland delivery”, then hit consumers in the north with fees.
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After fresh talks with the MSP at Holyrood yesterday, Mr Parker told the Press and Journal enforcement notices were already having the desired effect.
“We’ve found so far that just doing that, drawing attention to what they can and can’t say, is getting about 50% compliance.
“We then follow up with the other 50% and we get compliance in almost all of them,” he said.
“I think the compliance rate for the first dossier, there was around about 115 companies that Richard drew to our attention, there was around about 97%, so it’s good.
“But it’s an ongoing thing.”
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Mr Parker revealed the issue had not been on the ASA’s radar prior to Mr Lochhead’s campaign, but that it was now a “significant” part of its work.
“We had had some complaints from people about delivery surcharges, and we had published some upheld rulings, and some claims on websites, but it wasn’t really until we spoke to Richard last December that we got a sense of the scale of the problem,” he said.
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“So it has been good to respond to it, and do this work, and to work with Richard and others to try to put a lid on this problem; to make inroads into tackling this problem.”
Asked if he was confident the body could “put a lid” on the misleading claims, Mr Parker said: “Yes, I do. I think it’s an ongoing process.
“But I think that our objective and ambition has got to be to get on top of the problem.
“You’re never going to get perfection, and you should never expect perfection with these sorts of issues – there will always be someone that decides to make a misleading claim.
“And I don’t think our success should be judged on whether that might happen, we should be judged on whether we’ve got it under control.
“I don’t think we’ve yet got it under control, but we’ve made inroads into it, and we’ll keep at it.”
Mr Parker also said that the delivery charges issue could be an area in which new technology is “trialled” to improve regulation of websites, saying “watch this space”.
Last night, Mr Lochhead said: “It has been really encouraging that the ASA has been given a new focus on tackling it.
“Of course I’ve managed to send them two separate dossiers of cases that the public have brought to my attention, and they’ve all been acted upon with enforcement notices on the relevant companies that have flouted the regulations.
“But there’s still a long way to go.”
