The Campaign sites are now updated and allow you to submit your consultation responses more easily and quickly. (The Ofcom documents are very weighty and would take a long time to go through yourself.) Either of these sites help you to compile your own response much more quickly.

I think everyone that is annoyed by these 0870 etc. DPNs should send  responses to these consultations to show Ofcom just how many consumers there are that are annoyed by this problem. There are 2 responses to send. Don't foget to send yours! You can use either:
http://www.freeweb.telco4u.net/rachelf or 
http://0870abuse.tripod.com.

Thanks. I just like to get my facts right dorf. So I can say in a letter that some 0870s pay 4p/min or more.

Geoff Brighton at Ofcom courteously explained to me that:

'The suggestion of encouraging users of NTS numbers to publish alternative geographic numbers is discussed, albeit briefly, in the consultation document at paragraph 6.5. This is in relation to work we have already undertaken with the Central Office of Information in the guidance they give to Government departments. The paragraph reads:

" The COI provides advice and support to public sector organisations on all aspects of communications. Amongst other things, it publishes ‘better practice guidance’ for Government contact centres (see the COI web site at http://www.coi.gov.uk/ccg/). Ofcom and the COI have discussed the use of 08 and 09 numbers by government departments. The COI has been working on an update of its ‘better practice guidance’, and Ofcom has been able to suggest some amendments to this guidance, aimed at:

•     raising the awareness of contact centre managers of the cost of 084 and 087 calls;

•     encouraging the use of geographic numbers alongside 084/087 numbers, so that consumers have a choice; and

•     ensuring that publicity materials do not include any potentially misleading terms, such as ‘local rate’ or ‘national rate’, when describing the cost of calls."

We at Ofcom do encourage this practice and have ourselves published both 0845 and geographic numbers for callers wishing to contact this office.'

Meanwhile the Dept of Transport has replied to my MP defending the DVLA's use of 0870 numbers. DVLA clearly knows nothing of the COI guidance. They claim that they can only get the call logging and diversion technology they need by using 0870. That can't be true, can it? Ofcom's real and 0845 numbers definitely both connect me to exactly the same "press 1/2/3/4 to join the right queue" system.

I guess it may be true that BT only sell their advanced call handling stuff packaged with 0870. Does any reader know of telcos who definitely sell it fronted by real numbers?

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You can't get NTS call handling fronted by real numbers but you can get all the features of 0870 NTS call handling, routing and call load information with either an 0845 or with an 0800 Non Geographic NTS number.

I know because the local authority I am a councillor on has just set up an outsourced telephone bill payments service on an 0845 number.

I challenged this with everyone under the sun but in the end the answer was that if we didn't use 0845 we totally lost control if we needed to switch the payments call centre to another third party operator as we would have all the wrong info on our stationery etc, etc, whereas the 0845 number could just be redirected elsewhere at no further cost to us.  Also the problem that as a local authority the more expensive to run geographic number would be noted to be somewhere 70 miles away.

But the real clincher was that if we used a geographic number that apart from losing control of redirecting the calls at a moment's notice that we would also be charged a lot extra for the service by the call centre we were employing to take the credit card payments.

There is no difference in the call handling facilities available between 0845 and 0870, the only difference is the lower revenue share and/or unavailability of revenue share (depening what call volumes you receive) if you use an 0845 number.

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Excellent answer.

I shall put your question straight away to our head of IT and let you know what the response is.

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I don't believe we pay anything at all for the inbound calls to our Council's 0845 service so the above solution costs a lot more.  The point of that service is for people who want to give the world the impression that they are in the City of London, when they are not, and are prepared to pay extra for that privilege.

The calls to our 0845 number are actually terminated by Kingston communications who our automated payments service supplier uses to route the calls on to their ISDN switches that support the touch tone bill payments software (undoubtedly old technology but this supplier do seem to offer a very cheap deal to the Council for the service, so I expect newer technology costs more money).

Our bill payments platform supplier are adamant they do not get any call share revenue so the only people who can be are Kingston Communications, presumably as a quid pro quo for supporting a special kind of ISDN switch?

Using an 01306 number and then using Voice Over IP to forward the calls is not currently an option because our council has not so far implemented any Voice Over IP telephony solutions for its phone equipment and it would not be cost effective to implement such a project just for the benefit of this particular new service.

This is why in the real world there are a huge number of things that push organisations to adopt 0845.  The real sin lies in the code being excluded from inclusive calling plans and charged at different rates off peak call rates from BT Option 1 geographic local calls.  But of course this is bound to happen unless pay as you go dial up internet access is separated onto a different access code as it should have been from the outset if OFTEL hadn't been so fast asleep!

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Transport for London have a biggish call centre but it is all in one place and they do not reroute the calls anywhere else so don't have to have 0870.  Also as nearly all the calls they receive are from London they probably also don't have the BBC obsession about where the calls are from or even about the people who called them and who hung up before they were answered by a call taker (yet another feature of 0870).

Still TFL are very much bucking the trend on this as most one office call centres are still on 0845 or an 0870 numbers these days just to get a few more pennies out of their customers.  Perhaps TFL think that after paying £2.20 to go one stop on the tube and then having to call to complain there was a 20 minute service gap that paying £1 for the call might be the last straw.

As for OFTEL its failure to act was corruption/active connivance without a doubt.  I spoke to one of the senior Ofcom directors responsible for allowing the 0990/0870 codes in the first place 3 to 4 years ago and he made it perfectly clear that Ofcom had absolutely no intention of doing anything about it even though he knew exacly what was going on.

Many senior OFTEL employees formerly worked at BT or other major Telco companies and then immediately went straight back to their original employers after a short period learning how to evade the OFTEL regulatory system.

BT seems to have been told that 0870 could carry on unstopped so long as they agreed to roll out ADSL to nearly all of the uncovered remaining uk rural exchanges.

If you would like to hear the "You and Yours" coverage here is the link (all 5mins & 29 seconds worth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/ram/youandyours_20041213_1.ram

Hope it helps.  It includes some advice from 'a Government' spokesman. It is good to know they are interested in the cause, but as someone said earlier in this thread - it needs to be on tv.