Another article by David Derbyshire:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/06/nphone06.xml&sSh...

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Advertisers were told yesterday to stop describing lucrative 0870 and 0845 numbers as "national" and "local" rate telephone lines.

The Committee of Advertising Practice said that newspaper, magazine and poster advertisements should make clear the real cost of dialling the numbers.

An 0870 number costs 8p a minute from a British Telecom line during the day - more than twice the cost of a call to an 01 or 02 geographic number. An 0845 number costs about 4p a minute. Calling the numbers from a mobile phone costs up to 40p a minute. [...]
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People in the Advertising World do tend to follow ASA advice. See the following which gives the ASA full views on this matter.
http://www.asa.org.uk/cap/news_events/news/2005/hanging+on+the+telephone+on+and+...

There is also a complaint that was upheld by The ASA ,about a small business in Crawley describing  0870 as a national rate call in a newspaper ad. Suitable advice was given and the business owner stopped using 0870 i believe. I cant find the link to this at the mo.

There is a complaint form on the ASA site that can be utilised.

The CAP executive no longer allows advertisers to be silent about the price of a call!!!

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According to the DT article interested parties were only told yesterday the 5/8/05,so you have got to give it a chance for the decision to to trickle through. Then i guess we could start complaining.

It is good to see that a advertiser like the AA is heeding there advice partially by giving the price of calls,but unfortunately still talking about local/national calls.See
www.theaa.com/aboutaa/contact.html

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Pardon me but this advice has been on the CAP part of the ASA's website for 2 to 3 months at least.  It seems that Mr Derbyshire has an altered understanding of reality in more ways than one.  He still seems to think BT Option 1 is the cheapest way to make a phone call in this country.  He doesn't know about voipcheap or voipbuster or TalkTalk Talk3 etc, etc.  His only yardstick is whether the thing costs more than what the laziest and most stupid BT customer may pay.  But surely he is writing in the Daily Telegraph and not The Sun or the Daily Mail.

Also the CAP advice is only codifying the 2003 advice of Leicester City Council to Ofcom that anyone suggesting that 0845 was local rate or 0870 was national rate was guilty of a Criminal Offence under Part III of the Consumer Protection Act 1987.   And that was before BT abolished its local rate for 99% of its customers.

I am looking forward to next week's article in Surrey Adveriser group newspapers accusing Surrey Police of breaking the law by repeatedly getting call centre staff to assure customers that 0845 was "only the BT local rate sir".  This despite repeated letters and communications to Surrey Police by myself telling them they are not.  I even asked the chief cosntable a question about their misuse of 0845 numbers at the annual surrey police authority press conference but Surrey Police still continue to think that they are above the law.

The official CAP statement is now available:

http://www.cap.org.uk/cap/news_events/news/2005/Stop+the+call+confusion.htm

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Advertisers quoting 084 or 087 telephone numbers that suggest a ‘local’ or ‘national’ call rate have been told that they need to make the cost of calls to those numbers much clearer to consumers.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) – the body responsible for writing and enforcing the advertising rules for non-broadcast media - has told advertisers who quote 084 and 087 (or non-geographic numbers) in their non-broadcast advertisements that they must:

not describe calls to those numbers as being charged at ‘local’ or ‘national’ rate.
state the maximum cost of calls to BT customers and indicate that call costs using non-BT phone lines may vary.

On their introduction, calls to 084 numbers were charged at the BT standard local rate and those to 087 numbers were charged at BT standard national rate. Calls made from other phone companies were often more expensive.

BT has abolished its standard rate for the majority of its customers, making the description of calls being charged at local or national rate meaningless for them. As a result most consumers dialling 084 or 087 numbers have no idea what the cost of those calls will be.

CAP Secretary, Roger Wisbey said “Advertisers might think that by including non-geographic numbers in their ads, they are being more customer-friendly by enabling consumers to call them at a local or national rate from wherever they are based in the UK. In fact, those calls might cost consumers far more than anticipated. The new requirements should help to ensure that consumers are more aware of the charge for making calls to 084 and 087 numbers.”
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Is there any fundamental difference between either of these prononoucements by the CAP of the ASA and:-

http://www.asa.org.uk/cap/news_events/news/2005/Hanging+on+the+telephone+on+and+...

The latter was published several months ago.

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One would hope that this ruling is at least a little scary to two of the principal local scammers here in Surrey, namely the Surrey Police and Surrey County Council.  Especially as they are both public bodies and not private businesses.

My crystal ball tells me they are both about to receive very unfavourable publicity about their scamming in the local press.

A visit to http://www.surrey.police.uk/ will show you that they currently describe their 0845 as a "Lo-Call" number and the staff on the line say "its only a local rate call" if challenged on the price.  Staff at Surrey County Council also misleadingly claim that calls to their 0845 main contact centre number are "local call rate".