At last some journalists who understands this scam inside out.

Mr Derbyshire at the Daily Telegraph should be fired by the Editor of the Daily Telegraph for this disgraceful missed opportunity for his newspaper and for totally ignoring my suggestions that this was a story best covered by his hard news colleagues.

The Chief Executive of Pito and his whole board should resign.  None of the senior management of Pito were even in their London office on Friday which is a total outrage.  Nor have they read or replied to their email over the weekend.

Ms Beaton at the Met should resign for, on her own admission, previously being completely and utterly ignorant and uninformed about these calling costs when she is paid to be an expert on information and technology issues for the Met and is also a director of Pito.

She hasn't even managed to get the 020 Casualty Bureau properly listed as a full alternative to the 0870 number as she promised me would happen on Friday afternoon.  She hasn't even bothered to keep tabs on her email or on the content of this thread over the course of the weekend.

The Met and Pito is lying when it says it doesn't get a payment from the 0870 number for these calls.  The payment they are getting is the entire large minus number they should be paying to C&W for running this service for them on an 0800 number, although personally I would have thought that a company as large and profitable as C&W would have been delighted to run this vital service on an 0800 number at its own cost as well as clearly publicising an 020 alternative (for mobile and overseas callers).

It is also a disgrace that the overpaid and two faced bureaucrats at Ofcom have still not forced all the uk mobile operators to carry 0800 calls to the uk car breakdown services and to any other genuine emergency 0800 number free of charge.  Ofcom make the usual bland assertions that they hope more publicity will improve things while then still listing their own 0845 number for the choice level of customer abuse rendered by most of the staff in their so called Conact Centre.

I think you are being rather too hard on C&W who are only a typical commercial carnivore trying to earn as much money as they can from business given the failure of governement ministers, Ofcom and Pito to properly control this matter in the public interest.  It is the duty of all these people to consider the public interest,  it is not the duty of C&W who are merely delivering telecoms services (that have actually worked technologically) they have been contracted to supply by these public sector bodies

I think members of this site should be writing to the national newspapers demanding the resignation of the Chief Executive of Pito, Mr Phillip Webb and also of its Chairperson, Chris Earnshaw,  a former BT director who would have been only too well aware of the implications of using 0870 for this emergency number.  We should also demand the resignation of Miss Ailsa Beaton given her dual failure as Director of Information at the Met and as a Director of Pito to inform herself properly on the implications of using an 0870 number for this service.

In addition I would also call for the resignation of Stephen Carter, the CEO of Ofcom and his Policy determining director sidekick, Mr Kip Meek.  Above everyone else Ofcom and its predecessor OFTEL are most to blame for the scandal which they now purport to condemn.

I and other members of the public have complained to OFTEL and Ofcom about the commercially unethical and misleading aspects of the way in which it has allowed the commercial sector to mismarket and misuse 084/7x numbers ever since 1998 when the domestic telephone market began to be subject to open competition in the cost of carrying calls.

Throughout this period OFTEL maintained there was no problem as these were apparently value added services that we the customer had a choice about using them that, along with alleged competitive pressure would resolve matters.

Then Ofcom in their first consultation on the matter maintained that as not many members of the public had complained to them about the issue there was no need for them to do anything about it.  Then when the public told them they did have to do something in their second consultation Ofcom proposed that a few more price points for 087x and 084x calls were all that was needed.  It totally ducked issues like the disgraceful ripoff prices charges made by the uk mobile phone mafia for these calls.  Not our problem they say and up to market forces to put that right.

Now Matt Peacock and his other totally disingenuous PR colleagues at Ofcom cunningly attempt to try to shift the blame for their own organisation's absolutely massive regulatory failure in serving the public interest by attempting to shift the blame on to Cable & Wireless and Pito for a situation that is totally of Ofcom's making by failing to see the problem coming and by failing to go to Tessa Jowell to ask for legislation to be brought before parliament to end the whole scandal of standard uk fixed line customer service bureau calls being charge at massive premium rates, especially from mobile phones.

The very first heads to roll on this though should be Mr Stephen Carter's and Mr Kip Meek's and they should be followed soon afterwards by those of Mr Chris Earnshaw and Mr Philipp Webb.  In addition we should also demand the head of Ms Hazel Blears, the Police Minister, for immediately failing to intervene and demand that the Police provide an 0800 and 020 geographic number for this accident bureau .  And believe you me our friends at C&W can flip the switches needed to set up new 0800 numbers and geographic numbers in less than an hour.  I know this for a fact because they offer this very service to none other than the BBC.

Lastly we should also demand the resignation of Tessa Jowell for having so long failed to require Ofcom to satisfactorily deal with this whole disgracefull NTS call centre abuse issue.

While we use this medium to express our disgust at PITO, Ofcom, the Home
Office and the Metropolitan Police, we should also spare a thought for the
individual identified in the 'thisismoney' article, Gous Ali, who is clearly in a distressed state:

"This has infuriated friends and relatives of those missing since the
outrages. Gous Ali, who has been touring London's hospitals trying to
contact his girlfriend, Neetu Jain, said: 'I have lost count of the number
of times I have called this number.

'Each time it is the same - people answering the phone in some other part of
the country who do not know anything of the geography of London. The last
time I called, it was someone in the West Midlands.

'No one ever calls us back. It is hopeless. And to think that they are
charging so much money for it makes it even worse.'"

Whilst Mssrs Webb, Carter, Meek, Brighton, Earnshaw and Ms Beaton are probably spending a relaxing Sunday afternoon sat on their ineffective butts, there are people like Mr Ali who are suffering and having to pay for the ineffectiveness and incompetence of government agencies and departments, and whilst most of us would be prepared to pay whatever it takes if we were in similar situations, the thought of UK agencies and private companies making a profit from death and injury is a disgrace. The costs of providing an 0800 number and a geographic equivalent are insignificant in comparison with the cost to people's lives, the cost of policing and the cost of the investigation. Imagine what the response would have been if New York City authorities issued a 1-900 number after the Sept 11 attacks.

There will also be thousands of relatives and friends that are calling this number from overseas. They will either be unable to get through and perhaps not understand why, or they will be paying a significant premium for the call - all due to the uselessness of the above organizations.

Given that the planning for a tragedy such as what happened last week will have been ongoing for several years now, the inability to provide something as relatively straightforward as a telephone number (free for UK, geographic for international) is inexcusable.

I'm not a fan of the Daily Mail. Its right-wing clap-trap does a lot of damage, however its comment today is spot on:

A shocking exploitation

The courage and resilience of our rescue services as they cope with the danger, horror and complexity of the terror bombings has been rightly praised. We are fortunate to live in a country where such devotion and discipline exist.

But there has been one area of the emergency provisions that has not been up to the same standard. Relatives of the missing have sometimes been treated with less consideration than they deserve. Operators could have been more helpful to distraught callers who were anxious for any information, however sketchy.

And it is shocking that worried families have had to use an expensive 0870 number. The taxpayer would surely not begrudge the cost of a free call in such grim circumstances, and it is wrong that anyone should profit from grief and fear.

Emergency planners should ensure that these faults are fixed now.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_...

Quote:


Presumably the British Transport Police are simply operating one of the many different casualty call centres for this emergency that are served by the 0870 number?

By calling the 020 number you are therefore simply being taken directly to one of the call centres that the 0870 number might have taken you to.

Quote:


But in this case everything they have written in this story is true.

Its just unfortunate that the Mail on Sunday would have missed the New Labour Stealth Tax angle on all this as that would have very fitted in stongly with their editorial political agenda.

Quote:


This is the reply I received from Frank Simmonds, Deputy Editor of Panorama, to my suggestion a few months ago that the time had come for the BBC to do an in depth feature on this issue.  But perhaps with the General Election safely out of the way they may now be more interested? :-

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Simmonds [mailto:Frank.Simmonds@bbc.co.uk]
Sent: 04 March 2005 11:46
To: NGM
Cc: Panorama; Andrew Bell-TVC
Subject: RE: Panorama In Depth Piece on Whole 084x/087x Money Making Scam?

Dear NGM -- Many thanks for your recent proposal for a Panorama investigation into 084x/087x call charges. We have decided to pass on it at this stage but will keep it on file. With an election looming the pressure on slots is intense at the moment. Best Wishes.

Frank Simmonds
Deputy Editor Panorama
Room 1118
BBC White City
201 Wood Lane
London W12 7TS

-----Original Message-----
From: NGM
Sent: 17 February 2005 20:48
To: Mike Robinson-Panorama
Cc: Panorama; Andrew Bell-TVC; Frank Simmonds
Subject: Panorama In Depth Piece on Whole 084x/087x Money Making Scam?

Dear Panorama,

Isn't it really about time that you considered devoting a whole program to the BT initiated 084x and 087x calling scam.  To how it has prevented proper competition in call prices for telecoms consumers, to how customers have been persistently lied to and misled over the actual call charges they are paying and also to the pots of money that BT earn out of calls routed to these numbers compared to numbers that start either 01 or 02.

Also to the reasons that until recently no one in the media was prepared to talk about this issue even though it is a multi billion pound industry.

I can't think of a better program than Panorama to do a proper investigation on something like this.

Regards,

NGM

Quote:


The whole point about 0870 numbers that have no alternative listed is that people cannot actually stop buying or change allegiances in a matter of seconds.  That is precisely what everyone here is so angry about.  It is an anti free market uncompetitive system.

If CW are really as worried as you make out how is it that my extensive emails to the Metropolitan Police and Ofcom on Thursday and Friday copied to Mr Steve Double and Mr Tim Stephens at CW produced not one response from them.

CW personnel do not respond because they are completely shameless and cynical on the issue as most more hard bitten corporate folk tend to be.

CW sold off their main retail telecoms business (One2One) some time ago and are now an almost entirely business to business operation.  So how exactly would you propose that the public goes about stopping buying their products to show its displeasure?