Ofcom announces its priorities for the coming year

Ofcom today published its 2013/14 Annual Plan, confirming its strategy and work programme for the next financial year. Its priorities in the 12 months are to:

Promote effective competition and informed choice. This will include ensuring effective competition and investment in both current and superfast broadband, and promoting choice for consumers through clear information and efficient switching processes.

Secure optimal use of spectrum. Ofcom will support the future release of more spectrum for mobile broadband, to meet consumers' growing demand for data.

Promote opportunities to participate. For consumers and citizens to benefit from communications services, they need to be able to access and make use of them. Ofcom's work in this area will include securing the universal postal service and working in collaboration with Government and industry on the availability of superfast broadband.

Protect consumers from harm. Ofcom will develop and enforce consumer protection policy on a range of issues. This will include reforming non-geographic telephone numbering to ensure price transparency and considering issues such as mid-contract price increases in mobile phone contracts.

Maintain audience confidence in broadcast content. This will involve relicensing the commercial public service broadcasters to ensure continued delivery of high quality, widely available public service channels.

2013/14 budget reduction

The work outlined above will be funded by a mixture of grant-in-aid and fees collected from the stakeholders Ofcom regulates.

Ofcom's budget for the financial year 2013/14 is £117.0m. This represents a reduction of 6.5 per cent in real terms (3.6 per cent in nominal terms) compared with its budget in 2012/13 of £121.4 million1.

This is year three of a four-year programme to significantly reduce expenditure across the organisation while maintaining capability and effectiveness2.

By 2014/15, the programme will have delivered a 28.2 per-cent real terms saving, benefiting both taxpayers and stakeholders. The bulk of this saving has now been delivered and Ofcom remains on course to achieve the target on schedule.

Ofcom's Annual Plan for 2013/14 can be found here.

Details of Ofcom's budget can be found here.

ENDS

NOTES FOR EDITORS

Costs for stakeholders in 2013/14 will vary in accordance with the work Ofcom intends to carry out in each sector, as set out in the Annual Plan.

Ofcom's four-year budget reduction programme will deliver a 28.2 per-cent real terms saving by 2014/15. The majority of the savings were delivered in year one; Ofcom's 2011/12 budget represented a 22.5 per-cent real terms year-on-year reduction on the previous year.

LINK:	http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/03/28/ofcom-announces-its-priorities-fo...
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