Beware of the sharks

According to Which, ‘It’s crunch time for unfair gym contracts’. The High Court decided last year that gym membership contracts which automatically roll forward, or which can’t be easily cancelled with 30 days’ notice, are unfair. The Office for Fair Trading (OFT) now plans to crack down on gyms that use these tricks to lock in their customers.

There are similar, often nastier, surprises in the small print of business waste collection contracts. A quick search shows that PHS Wastetech customers are particularly unhappy about the way they’re treated. They claim that contracts are automatically rolled forward unless you give 3 months’ notice at exactly the right point in the year, all sorts of additional charges are added to the bill and the contract allows PHS to increase prices at will. While complaints about PHS may be amongst the most high-profile, they’re far from unique.

Local authorities’ terms and conditions are of course designed to be scrupulously fair, so their advertised prices are typically higher than those offered by cowboy contractors. Council services therefore aren’t able to compete on equal terms with the artificially low introductory rates that some firms offer and the high level of sometimes unfair competition discourages some councils from targeting this market.

Local authorities are also well-placed to provide recycling collection services. So to the extent that the waste collection cowboys discourage councils from more actively offering these services, they’re discouraging the wider take-up of business waste recycling services.

This type of sharp practice is therefore bad for the environment, bad for small businesses and cuts across some of the key themes in Defra’s Waste Strategy Review. Perhaps whilst the OFT is persuading the gyms to shape-up, someone can ask them to look at what the sharks of the commercial waste world are up to.