British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has vowed to crack down on hard-to-cancel subscriptions and fake discounts as part of measures to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, Downing Street said Sunday.
The announcement came as the new Labour leader was set to return to work after a vacation and begin a tour of the country to talk to people about their financial pressures, his office said.
Burnham said in a statement that “people are sick and tired of rip-off discounts and subscription traps”, where subscriptions are hard to cancel or automatically renew at a higher cost. He said his government would be “making it as easy to leave a subscription as it is to join”.
Currently British consumers are “spending an estimated £1.6 billion (US$2.2 billion) a year on (subscriptions) they don’t actually want”, Downing Street said.
New rules will come into force in January next year, it said, forcing businesses to give customers “clearer up-front information, regular reminders and a much easier exit to contracts”.
There will be a new 14-day cooling-off period to let consumers cancel after a trial or a long-term contract renews, the government announced, without describing how this would be implemented.
Burnham also promised to tackle “misleading claims to customers about discounts” based on inflated full-price figures.
After nearly a decade as a regional mayor in northern England, Burnham has stressed his desire to move politics outside Westminster.
The Mirror newspaper reported his “cost of living tour” this month would cover all the United Kingdom’s constituent regions and include places such as Port Talbot in Wales, an economically depressed former steelworking town.
“I’ll be asking one question: what would actually make your life better?”, Burnham told the left-wing newspaper.
Entering office, the prime minister promised to draw up a 10-year plan for the country.
His first announcements included a tax cut on energy bills inflated by the US-Iran war, a cap on bus ticket prices and cutting business rates for pubs.
Opposition politicians on the right and left have criticized the measures as not going far enough. (AFP)
