There will be a piece on You & Yours on Monday 18 May about the changes to 0870 numbers due to come into effect on 1 August. It will include interviews with representatives of the SAYNOTO0870.COM campaign group and Ofcom.

You & Yours' website is www.bbc.co.uk/youandyours

[edit]Details of this programme, including a link to a recording can be found here.[/edit]

It will now take place on Monday 18 May.

Well, I listened to the discussion on the radio and the saynoto0870 rep was a real ball of fire, I don`t think! Very disappointed.

echo734 wrote on May 18^th, 2009 at 11:46am:

Well, I listened to the discussion on the radio and the saynoto0870 rep was a real ball of fire, I don`t think! Very disappointed.

I don't want to fall out with Dave since he does an absolutely stalwart job of running this website and discussion forum and maintaining the list of alternative numbers (with very little ongoing help these days from a certain Daniel who owns the website and takes all the advertising click thru revenue) but I have to say that I think he could have taken more advantage of the opportunity to take Ofcom to task on air over their grotesque failure over many years to honour their previous promises over 084/7 numbers or to protect the public from being ripped off when they call them.

There was for instance the small matter of the previous commitments by Matt Peacock of Ofcom given on the You and Yours program as long ago as 2004 and that Ofcom have not honoured and that Dave could have referred to.  And he could have slammed them for doing nothing at all over 0845 numbers and for not investigating the clearly anti competitive pricing of all the major UK mobile companies for calls to 080, 084 and 087 numbers.

I know that I would certainly have given Ofcom and their Mr Gareth Davies (who has been there ever since Ofcom started and all the way back to Matt Peacock days) a much harder time if I had been allowed to represent the www.saynoto0870.com campaign on today's broadcast.

I was sufficiently moved by the the whole thing to send the following email to You & Yours:-


Quote:

-------- Original Message -------- Subject:      Ofcom 0870 Changes - Far Too Little & Far Too Late Date:      Mon, 18 May 2009 14:10:37 +0100 To:      youandyours@bbc.co.uk CC:      julian.worricker@bbc.co.uk, winifred.robinson@bbc.co.uk, peter.white@bbc.co.uk, liz.barclay@bbc.co.uk, colette.bowe@ofcom.org.uk, geoff.brighton@ofcom.org.uk, gareth.davies@ofcom.org.uk, clive.hillier@ofcom.org.uk, panorama@bbc.co.uk, ed.richards@ofcom.org.uk, millie.banerjee@ofcom.org.uk, tim.gardam@ofcom.org.uk, philip.graf@ofcom.org.uk, stuart.mcintosh@ofcom.org.uk, mike.mctighe@ofcom.org.uk, peter.phillips@ofcom.org.uk, stewart.purvis@ofcom.org.uk, jill.ainscough@ofcom.org.uk, freya.guinness@ofcoml.org.uk, julian.eccles@ofcom.org.uk, OfcomAdvisoryCommitteeEngland@ofcom.org.uk, OfcomAdvisoryCommitteeScotland@ofcom.org.uk, OfcomAdvisoryCommitteeNorthernIreland@ofcom.org.uk, OfcomAdvisoryCommitteeWales@ofcom.org.uk, acodp@ofcom.org.uk, anna.bradley@communicationsconsumerpanel.org.uk, dominic.ridley@communicationsconsumerpanel.org.uk, jonathan.may@oft.gov.uk, john.fingleton@oft.gov.uk, vivienne.dews@oft.gov.uk, david.saunders@competition-commission.org.uk, rachel.merelie@competition-commission.org.uk, claudio.pollack@ofcom.org.uk Dear You and Yours, Further to the interview with Gareth Davies from Ofcom on your program just now (Monday 18th May 2009) I wanted to say that Ofcom and its predecessor OFTEL have taken nearly six years to announce any outcome at all on their review of 0870 numbers and these latest changes will make almost no difference at all as all the main former commercial users of 0870 numbers like Sky and Dixons Store Group (Currys and PC World) have already switched from 0870 to 0844 that is not subject to any of Ofcom's new call price or price disclosure requirements.  This 0844 number range is still also being widely misused by over a thousand GP surgeries against recommendations from Ofcom that this is not good practice. Your program and the representative from Ofcom also completely and utterly failed to tackle the issue of 0845 numbers that were historically linked to "local rate" (just as 0870 was linked to "national rate) but are now charged by mobile companies at up to 40p per minute and not included in bundled minutes.  Far more of these 0845 numbers are still being used by crucial government helplines like NHS Direct and JobCentrePlus.  Members of the www.saynoto0870.com campaign (including myself) even tried taking NHS Direct to the Information Tribunal over its continued use of 0845 4647 (instead of switching to 0345 4647 as it should have done) a year ago but NHS Direct used a spurious health and safety exemption to continue using 0845 numbers that cost up to 40p per minute from mobiles and 20p per minute from a BT Payphone instead of only 1p per minute from the same BT Payphone to numbers starting 01, 02 or 03.

Continued/................

Quote:

Ofcom is directly responsible for regulating the accuracy of the content of phone bills from all the large telecoms companies but has done precisely nothing whatsoever to stop phone companies from still calling 0870 and 0845 numbers "national rate" and "local rate" on their phone bills when they are no such thing.  The telecoms side of Ofcom does not seem to be on the side of protecting consumers at all but only on the side of protecting the profits and revenues of the telecoms companies.   Ofcom also seems highly schizophrenic in terms of its approach to interfering with business and its operation as they have just come down very hard indeed with large fines on broadcasters of encrypted pay adult satellite channels who have made inadvertent errors in allowing material to be transmitted that is more hard core than Ofcom broadcasting rules allow (but that is widely available with no restrictions at all on the internet).  Yet on 084/7 numbers the companies and government departments who run the call centres involved and the telecoms companies that customers use to call these numbers repeatedly quite deliberately mislead consumers right, left and centre over the call cost of 084 and 087 prefixed numbers (often still wrongly calling them "local rate" or "national rate" calls) but Ofcom does precisely nothing whatsoever about it.  Ofcom also previously announced that 0871 numbers costing 10p per minute would be made fully "premium rate" with call cost announcements and restrictions on the length of call queues but has now gone back on this by allowing the premium rate regulator PhonePayPlus (formerly ICSTIS) to set up a special regime for 0871 numbers in which there are no pre call price announcements and no restrictions on excessive call queuing length.  PhonePayPlus promises only that it may do something about excessive call queues if it receives a lot of complaints.  This is not much help to someone kept waiting 30 minutes to speak to a call centres at 10p per minute on their particular 0871call. Ofcom has also done nothing whatsoever to investigate the clearly cartel like anti competitive behaviour of all the major UK mobile companies over all 084 and 087 prefixed numbers where they do not just charge the real extra cost to them of these calls compared to 01/02/03 numbers but charge customers vast price premiums that do not reflect just a fair profit on their underlying extra costs but are simply abusive, apparently on the basis that many members of the public still do not understand that 084/7 prefixed numbers costs them vast extra sums to call. The only way to deal properly with 084 and 087 numbers is for all of them only to be allowed to be charged at normal call rates and included in all call package minutes on landlines and mobiles and for anyone who wants to charge extra for calling their call centre and to make a profit out of people calling them to use 09 numbers with a clear announcement to the caller they are being charged extra when they call these numbers. For nearly all other goods and services in the UK people know the cost of them before they make a purchase but phone call costs seem to be the one area of business where this is not true on a massive nationwide scale.  Even the so called Office of Fair Trading uses an 0845 number for customers to contact it when if it was following Ofcom advice it should long ago have switched to an 03 prefixed phone number.

Continued/.................

Quote:

All of this stems from the totally ineffective form of cosy "old school tie" style of voluntary telecoms regulation for which Ofcom has become so justly infamous since it was set up five years ago (this includes regular meetings behind closed doors with the telecoms industry at a body called the NTS Focus Group - see www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/groups/nts_focus/ - that no consumer representatives are even allowed to participate in).  I fail to see how Ofcom can on the one hand believe that polite suggestions are the way to deal with telecoms companies over full accurate call cost disclosure for calls that every household and every business in the UK has to make in massive volumes every single day of the week (i.e. calls to numbers starting 084 and 087) while Ofcom thinks it needs to use an iron fist with massive fines (in relation to the very small size of many of the companies involved) in respect of encrypted pornographic channels that only those people who want to watch that kind of content would have been viewing or have access to in the first place. Regards,

NGMsGhost wrote on May 18^th, 2009 at 1:27pm:

I was sufficiently moved by the the whole thing to send the following email to You & Yours:-

Those of us who have sought to engage with the media in connection with the campaign will know how difficult it is to control the agenda of a piece and to make an effective contribution.

Any member who is able to achieve this to any degree is to be thanked and celebrated.

Those who contribute to this forum have a wide range of views and so it is impossible to reflect them all in both the content and the strength of points that can be made. Even highly experienced and trained contributors often give performances that are well short of what any one of us might believe that we could have delivered.

It is good to see that at least one other member of the forum is seeking to contribute to Radio 4 coverage of these issues. It is most important that the widest possible range of views is heard.

Whilst I know that not all will share these views, I believe that media opportunities should be used to get as simple as possible a message across to the audience in the limited time that is available. I have also formed the view, from experience, that a simple news piece will never settle an issue in argument as the format is intended always to leave the audience to make up their own minds from the opposing arguments presented. If hoping for a further invitation to contribute, one must always seek to be interesting, concise and polite. One must remember that the media is primarily an entertainment medium where points of view can be presented, not a court in which issues are decided.

It is open for debate about whether this is how things should be, I personally would rather it were not, however I present my understanding of things as they are.

We can be pleased that there was some reference to 03 as the suitable option for public services.

SilentCallsVictim wrote on May 18^th, 2009 at 6:16pm:

One must remember that the media is primarily an entertainment medium where points of view can be presented, not a court in which issues are decided.

I think that rather depends on what part of the media we are talking about.  For instance E4 has very different values from BBC Four (television) and The Sun has a very different perspective from The Times (even though the same media mogul owns them both).  Similarly BBC Radio Four has a much more in depth approach than BBC Radio 5 Live, with the latter being unashamedly populist and mainly entertainment oriented in outlook.

Also I think programs like File on 4, Dispatches or Panorama would strongly contest that their only criteria in program making is entertainment value.

Coming back to today's program I think it presented different opportunities from normal because it was a direct head to head with Ofcom and such opportunities have been very rare throughout the history of the campaign.  Also they were claiming that all was well regarding their 0870 proposals on a radio station program where they had originally given very different commitments about their plans for tackling 084/7.

In those circumstances I think they could have been more heavily taken to task but it might have take a forum member with a more combative temperament as well as all the relevant campign history, such as myself or dorf, in order to achieve that.

There did seem to be quite a few opportunities today for the saynoto0870.com to more heavily attack Ofcom's shoddy record in not properly protecting the consumer against 084/7 abuse but for whatever reasons those opportunities were not altogether fully taken up.

NGMsGhost wrote on May 18^th, 2009 at 6:44pm:

it might have take a forum member with a more combative temperament as well as all the relevant campign history, such as myself or dorf, in order to achieve that.

Whilst respecting the availability and extent of the communications skills of every member, I would urge everyone to take every opportunity available to them to get the message across, although I would not go so far as to suggest that any of us can tell others what they should or should not do.

I offer advice only in the context of my own experience as a contributor to TV and radio news pieces and to newspaper news stories. Current affairs journalism, such as that referred to, is a wholly different animal, although it shares the characteristic of rarely seeking to draw final conclusions.

I do hope that all members, especially those with the most to offer, are doing all they can to secure and take advantage of opportunities to spread the message through the media.

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