Terms and Conditions: What would good t&cs look like?

Thanks William.

Everyone, please do help us with this. It would be great to hear your thoughts

Someone (the government ?) should write a set of T&C's that satisfy most circumstances.
Companies would then certify "Our T&C's comply with the govn standard"
OR "Our T&C's comply with the govn standard, EXCEPT" and then list a set of exceptions. The length of the set of EXCEPTIONS will tell you something about the company.
You then only need to read the standard set once

MSE_Andrea wrote: »

Who's done one or both surveys?

Thanks to everyone who has already!

If you'd rather not reply on there it would be great to get your thoughts here on the questions. This is your opportunity to feed in, don't waste it!

I tried but kept getting an error message on one of the later pages.

The problem is that the party writing the T&C's write them to try and protect themselves as much as possible. They're generally not written to protect both parties and usually as a consumer, the most protection you have (T&C wise) is where mandated by law!

Word choice can be very important in law, so I'm not sure of the validity of the idea of making terms and conditions simple enough for most people to fully understand not only the terms themselves, but the implications.

tomtontom wrote: »

Surely that is because the law is very generous in that respect?

In terms of basic law position yes. But my point is that retailers only give that protection because they have to and even then, some try to restrict or remove them - often misleading hundreds or thousands of customers in the process.

For example, when was the last time a company charging late fee's would have a term saying they'll pay you £x if they're late in carrying out their side of it regardless of costs incurred?

Or when tied into a minimum term, the company can end the service before the minimum term is up without liability - sometimes because its no longer financially viable to provide the service, yet when you want to cancel (even if for the same reason of not being financially viable) they'll try and charge you the remaining contract amount or a large part of it.

Legislation might offer consumers protection, but T&C's don't, if anything, they offer the opposite. Consumers have a hard enough time trying to get retailers to even comply with law, never mind T&C's.

I'm sick of T&Cs being in such small print, I think they must be using 6pt or less. T&Cs should be DDA (Disability Discrimination Act)-compliant which means at least 12pt. If firms had to use a proper font size the T&Cs would take up such an absurdly large number of pages they would have to shorten them, which would make them more readable. An enterprising website could also track firms with the longest T&Cs to ridicule them.