Consumer watchdog Deco conducted an analysis of the websites of providers of the essential services in three sectors – water, energy (including electricity and gas) and electronic communications – to check whether they offered access to a complaints book, as required since 1 July of 2017.
The study covered the entire country, including mainland Portugal, the Azores and Madeira, with a total of 392 websites. Of these, 62 percent did not comply with the legislation on making available a space for complaints.
The highest rate of non-compliance was in the water sector: of the 352 sites reviewed, 229 did not have an electronic complaints book, equivalent to 70 percent.
In the energy sector, the rate of non-compliance was 39 percent, with 14 out of the 36 sites reviewed failing to obey the legislation on this matter.
“These non-compliance rates could be much higher if we took into account the exact terms that the law determines for this obligation” to make a space for complaints available, said Deco legal expert Margarida Moura, recalling that under the law the complaints book must be visible and easily accessible.
“In many situations we were only able to access the complaints book by searching the site itself,” she noted. “Often, access was seen to be via a link or logo whose colours and size could easily go unnoticed by a consumer.
“At other times we had to go through all the menus and we found the access within an information menu,” Moura reported, explaining that Deco considered such situations to represent compliance with the law.
The law in question foresees penalties for non-compliance in the form of fines ranging from €1,500 to €15,000.
In view of its findings, Deco says that, it has expressed its concerns to Portugal’s consumer affairs about the failure of service providers to comply with their obligations in this regard.
On 1 July Portugal’s secretary of state for commerce, Paulo Alexandre Ferreira, told Lusa News Agency that the law’s first year in effect had been “very positive”, with “about fifty thousand complaints” having been lodged via online complaints books.