We all know that non-geographic numbers route to at least one underlying geographic number. In order to receive calls via NEG's 0844 number, a GP practice needs to rent normal telephone lines from a physical network provider such as BT. These physical lines installed in the practice's building will have at least one geographic telephone number. Because the practice rents these physical telephone lines, they must know the telephone number(s). The number appears on their phone bill and they would have had to supply the number(s) to NEG in order to set up the 0844 number.

Are these assumptions correct? If so, I don't believe any GP practice can truthfully deny under the FOI Act that they know their underlying geographic phone number.

The issue of whether every NGN always has an associated GN to which it is routed, and which may or may not be dialled as an accessible GN has been discussed in detail in at least one other thread

And the answer is NO! NGNs do not now always have an accessible GN which may be dialled.

Dave,

I believe that if a surgery does not have an assigned GN number it also will not know what it is? Or am I missing something here?

Dave, it is not possible to execute queuing with a local system of any sort on a single line ("as the NGN"), but queueing may be done at the exchange and then routed to a single line, which probably is unknown to the GP as a GN and may not be dialled directly as a GN. Otherwise any entity including a GP must have n lines in to undertake queueing with a local system.