Hopefully not, since according to her comments she was clearly instrumental in choosing to change over to an 0870 number?

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Or to ask NEG how a telephone system which 'answers' calls by dumping them in a queue can cost the caller less than one which gives the engaged tone if there's nobody available to answer?

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Dorf,

You are much too hard on her.

At least she has admitted that they were conned rather than coming up with the usual corporate PR flannel to try to justify the totally unjustifiable.

Personally I would give this woman an OBE for plain speaking.

Sorry NGM,

our lines crossed. I was evidently posting a reply to your previous post, whilst you were posting a reply to my post.

In reply to your last post I do not feel I am being too hard on the Practice Manager! This is a classic example of the current government-related spin, which has now rolled off into all sectors of the NHS. When caught out they attempt to claim they "did not know!" It is their job to know or find out. A Practice Manager so called is supposed to be one competent to run the admin. for a GP practice.

Management is about making decisions based on the facts. If you do not know the facts then you need to ascertain what they are before making any decision!

Also if anyone needs to be sacked here it should be the GP Partners of the Practice for not checking up on whether or not what their Practice Manager is recommending is also good for their patients as well.

When I visited the doctor before I wrote my letter to them, I asked her what was the crack with the appalling 0870 number change scam.

She told me that she found the new phone system to be troublesome at best.  She said that I should write to the practice manager to complain, who replied to me with a standard b****x letter.

Which minister is on the board of NEG, or is receiving an enviable back hander?

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These days that sort of thing is just not allowed and if what you claimed was true the minister would definitely lose his job as a minister, be banned from the house of commons either permanently or temporarily and have to hand all the money back.  And that is the best he could hope for.  They might end up in court and in prison.

But what is clear is that the whole move to 0845 and 0870 by government departments is yet another new Labour stealth tax and was probably dreamed up by none other than Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson or Alistair Campbell

The Minister of Health was actually endorsing the use of these 0870 numbers as a good way to fund more investment in doctors surgeries through hidden taxation through phone calls.  So how you can blame the poor saps who are practice managers who have a hundred other things to deal with every day and who are generally only in this role because they like to think they understand business when actually they don't (the salaries are so poor for these jobs that no one who is any good at business would actually become a practice manager) is beyond me.

If the Minister of Health says its a great thing then inevitably a modest number of toe the corporate line types in the doctors practices are going to go with the flow.  The villians here are OFTEL, who allowed the hidden revenue sharing system, BT who ruthlessly missold it by claiming that calls were just the national and local rate when they never were and the Minister of Health for actively supporting the scam.  The Practice Managers are just the dummies at the bottom end of a chain of very elaborate, deceit, lying and deliberate disinformation of which even Saddam Hussein would have been proud.

The fact that most doctors surgeries have not joined this scam says that most of them actually have more integrity but but when someone like The Samaritans has an 0845 number in the new BT Phonebook you can see that these doctors practices are hardly the only inappropriate people using such numbers.  It says a lot for the integrity of most doctors surgeries that they resisted the scam despite it being pushed so hard by the Department of Health.  Also doesn't pretending that your call being answered by a machine more quickly then makes your queuing time shorter just sound so classically New Labour in terms of fiddling the targets.

Anyhow enough said as these Practice Managers are only at the bottom of the food chain.  Your anger should be directed towards those like Mr Ben Verwaayen at BT who have spent years actively condoning and growing this whole con.

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Was he not also the spokesman for NEG on You & Yours another couple of times too after that?

It seemed to me that he was actually incapable of learning the error of his ways.  A prime requisite in almost anyone who actively missells 084x/087x numbers.