This Statement sets out Ofcom’s final decisions in respect of the January Consultation proposals which consist primarily of a new format for the published regulatory financial report.
The structure of the report has been changed to make it more accessible to a wider audience without losing the information necessarily used by the regulatory community. The intention of these changes is to move the key information to the front of the document and push the (simplified) supporting analysis to the back of the report. The main changes can be summarised as follows:
- to provide a wider audience with an understanding of the key issues, the overall performance of BT’s regulated activities will be reported and explained at the front of the document (with a focus on the wholesale access markets);
- to provide the regulatory community with evidence of tests of compliance with obligations and sufficient information to understand and challenge this evidence, most of the detailed financial information currently provided will still be required;
- to give all users a better understanding of how costs are shared by products and services, new annexes will illustrate and explain how group costs and assets are allocated across all markets;
- to provide a market by market overview of financial performance and evidence of first order tests of compliance with BT’s obligations to offer cost-oriented charges and not to discriminate unduly, key financial data will now be set out on a single page summary for each market;
- to aid understanding, markets will be organised into groups; and
- to simplify reporting and facilitate comparison of the underlying data across different markets, detailed support for the data used in the first order tests for each market will be collated and included in a section towards the back of the report.
The effect of these changes will be to reduce the length of the regulatory financial report whilst making sure that, with the exception of some of the LRIC analysis, very little information that is currently provided will be lost. This reflects Ofcom’s view that an informed industry contributes to effective and efficient regulation and takes account of examples provided by industry of the ways in which published information has contributed to effective competition and informed, focussed requests for intervention.