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

MacMickster

mike2005 wrote: »

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

To expand on Mike's suggestion, where there is an industry (or government) standard set of terms and conditions then these should be published as one document. Any variance or additional Ts and Cs should then be published in a second document, but with a key facts summary at the front of that document.

In any dispute, the onus should be on the party that drafted the Ts and Cs to justify any variation from the standard, and also to prove that the variation has been made clear (as opposed to buried in 40 pages of bumph) to the consumer, otherwise the condition should be found to be null and void.

webwiz

It is crazy thousands, maybe millions, of people all ploughing through the T&C. At least for the most popular ones why can't we have a website like MSE that does it for us?

The site could report any conditions of concern and also grade the contract of fairness and comprehensibility. It could be funded by subscription or advertising - or even MSE.

3guesses

mike2005 wrote: »

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

That would be a very useful approach, but I suspect it would be very difficult to implement. If possible, I would have thought the standard T&Cs would be produced by the Ombudsman or official association for that industry.

An alternative would be for the company to provide a summary of the salient points of their T&Cs at the top of the document before going into the fine detail (most of which is fairly irrelevant or common sense stuff). I think banks already do this sort of thing with their accounts' literature?

3guesses

hollydays wrote: »

Some disreputable companies try to hide their terms in different parts of their site.
Sometimes , the returns policy isn't in the terms and conditions , its hidden , for example , amongst pages and pages of text to make it deliberately hard to find.
Also some sites that get people to sign up for a free trial do this too, using the " continuous service" model.
Therefore it seems that where there are charges , they should be near the start of the t& cs to avoid any claims of being less than transparent.

That's a very good point. Some online companies have their T&Cs in several different documents to cover different eventualities/products/services. They should be required to be in a single document, and a customer should be provided with a link to it at the "checkout" stage.