I know what you mean cleversod and it's about time this government legislated against it.
My Sky subs are taken out "on or around" the 27th of each month according to my contract. Most of the time it's trouble free, but last year they called for the DD on the 20th of a month because there was a bank holiday around the 27th. Now, we try to make sure we put the Sky money into the account around the 20th just to be on the safeside, but that date was on a weekend, so we left it until first thing Monday morning. Within days we had a letter from the bank, saying Sky had called for the money, but the bank had not paid it due to insufficient funds. Because they had let us know of this by letter, they were charging us �36 for the pleasure!
To add insult to injury, Sky sent us a letter saying that they had called for the money, the bank had refused payment and advised us to make sure that their was money in the account in future!
I saw red. I went marching down to the bank, but they would not budge over it. They simply would not accept that Sky had been unfair to call for the money seven days before the due date. As a result we had to pay that �36 charge.
Personally, I don't think it's ever going to stop. An economist friend of mine told me years ago that it was the banks that ruled this country not governments. They've always had the power to make or break governments so no government will stand up to the. It seems to me nowadays, that these big companies like BT and British Gas are slowly but surely doing the same.
Nowadays, we all rely so much on call centres to handle complaints and queries that they only thing they have to do when they get tired of it all is to stop answering the phone. It's so simple but effective.