Jim Armitage: Vodafone fine is nothing — Ofcom caved in over its big call

Blimey. Ofcom headmistress Sharon White has finally given a serious ticking-off to one of the phone companies for ripping off its customers.

Vodafone has been found taking 10,500 pay-as-you-go customers’ top-up cash and not crediting it to their accounts.

A pretty basic failing, for which the company (profit last year: £11.6 billion), has been fined £3.7 million.

Getting into her stride, White also slapped Voda, the most-complained-about mobiles company in the country, with a detention for the way it dealt with customers’ grievances.

The thing is, taking a few bob from multinationals for their mistakes is a relatively easy task for a regulator.

The tougher decisions, dealing with the structural problems of the phone industry that survive from the old days of the nationalised BT monopoly, White has ducked.

Forcing BT to give up Openreach’s grip on the final mile of cable to our homes would have been difficult, but would give millions of customers, or “victims” from my experience, far better service for generations.

But Ofcom caved in to BT’s lobbying and focuses instead on more trivial issues like Voda’s procedural screw-ups.

As taxpayers, we should rejoice at Clydesdale’s appearance as a possible white knight to take Williams & Glyn off RBS’s hands.

But RBS customers who’d move over in the deal may not be quite so happy.

First, a brief history lesson: RBS has spent millions of man hours and £1.2 billion trying to carve the W&G’s computer platform out into a separate entity.

All its efforts failed. That’s why Santander walked away from a bid four years ago, then returned this year with a low price which RBS rejected.