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Following a particularly dreadul murder in North Wales NWPolice have published two 0845 contact numbers (one English, one Cymraeg) - as the only contact numbers on the poster.
And many people now only use a mobile, although I can not recall the proportion.
So, in an attempt at returning to try to answer your question, any reason to contact one's police force is likely to be made from a mobile.
Perhaps not the place to comment about the cones hotline?

Why do you need to confine this to mobile and payphones bbb, disgusting though those call rates to 0845 obviously are.

The fact is that to report something like fraudulent use of a credit card on the phone to the Police can take 20 to 25 minutes and the Police run a 24/7 service for reporting non emergency crimes.

So if you call about your credit card fraud, your vandalised car or whatever in the evening or the weekend then a 20 minute call to 0845 will be 60p from a BT landline compared to 5.5p to an ordinary 01 or 02 number or indeed zero p to an 01 or 02 for anyone on BT Options 2 or 3.

So because the Police run 24/7 its very easy to win the 0845 cost argument, even on a BT home landline.  Obviously for an outfit open 9am to 5pm Mon to Fri then its only  BT Option 3 customers or equivalents for whom 0845 is very bad news but the police are open all the time.

Its interesting to hear the Police blocking you over this.  Did you not refer them to Pito - www.pito.org.uk and the Met London bombings helpline where Pito/the Met did force Cable & Wireless to release a a geographic number after 24 hours.  And bearing in mind that Pito advises all uk police forces on telephony I bet this is another Cable & Wireless deal.  Given that Cable & Wireless are also at the back of the BBC 0870 scam and I rather suspect Cable & Wirless NGN contracts are especially vicious about the consequences of the client disclosing a geographic alternative number.

I have long delayed an FOI to Surrey Police but the news that 0845 scamming is to continue for a long time and your own recent difficulties with getting the Police to disclose the geographic number now encourage me to do so.

Or has idb also FOI'd Surrey Police already?  Just how many uk governmental and quasi governmental bodies are you pursuing idb?   It seems to run wider than just those bodies that you actually use the services of from what I can see?

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I'm not so convinced about all public bodies being bad but it certainly does typify the arrogance of a lot of uk Police forces who consider themselves to generally be above the law.  Unfortunately senior Policemen do not have to stand for re-election.

Leave Surrey Police to me.  I will probably copy in members of the Surrey Police Authority at the same time as several are county councillors for whom I have personal email addresses.  I find copying in county councillors usually gees things up a bit.  I also have the personal email address of the Chairman of Surrey Police Authority.  The Surrey Police website still uses the words Lo-Call against their 0845 number but then so of course does every such call listing on a BT phone bill.  Has anyone trawled through the 250 pages of new consultation yet to see if there is any proposal to stop the use of the terms Lo-Call, Local Rate, National Call and National Rate against 0845 and 0870 numbers?  If not Ofcom deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered over this.

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Thanks for the link - I certainly will contact the Police Authority on Monday. My faith in the IC has dropped significantly. It has failed to respond to progress requests relating to UKPA and Herts Police complaints. It seems to be an impotent body. It claims that it has far too much work! Now, it doesn't take the brain of Britain to realize that if legislation comes into force on Jan 1, 2005 giving the public access to FOI, and also provides a method for resolution of complaints, then you need the staff to handle such complaints. Like Ofcom, its problems are of its own making.

Im still waiting on herts to give me the response of my Internal Review outcome for the 27th September!

We now need somone to do a draft version of a complaint to the IC now.

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Baz,

Sadly Ofcom only propose imminent action to disallow commission on 0871 numbers as a non premium rate service.  Those services and the commissions earned will continue but eventually (such as in may be two years time) the providers may be forced to switch to an 09 number.

Ofcom do not propose to disallow 0844 and 0845 commission for a very long time, if at all, and on 0870 you will still be allowed to have commission as the receiving party as long as you add a call price announcement.

I fear you may have been rather misled by Ofcom's own quite deliberately misleading press announcement.  You need to read their 250 pages worth of consultation documents (or possible the summary documents for those longer documents) to uncover what they are really up to.

NGN is spot on with his observation that there are very valid reasons to use geographic numbers to contact the police via a fixed line.

Several years ago we reported a fraud to the East Sussex police who only publshed an 0845 number for non emergency contact. We made many calls and spent a lot of time waiting in the queue, mostly to no avail. Usually after a long wait the officer dealing with the case was not available and all we could do was leave a message, which needless to say was not answered. Although the money we spent on calls was not comparable to our loss, it was part of the reason why we give up trying to get the police to catch the culprit.

However, very off topic, but to give the East Sussex police their due. My daughter was hit by an uninsured driver. The police eventually traced this person, who was best described as itinerate, and established that he did have an insurance certificate, but it had been cancelled by his brokers. As it was longer than 6 months since the offence had been committed they could not prosecute but passed on the basic information to my insurance company, Direct Line. Almost one year on from the date of the crash Direct Line were still maintaining that they could not pay out on their uninsured driver promise, because he may have been insured with another company, and in order to establish this they needed to talk with him. Despite my protestations that if he had had valid insurance he would have produced this for the police, they insisted that they would have to keep trying to find this person. In exasperation I rang the East Sussex police and spoke with the officer who had interviewed him. I explained that I did not want to waste his time on such a trivial matter but that Direct Line were giving me the run around. I explained what they were doing and he went ballistic. He rang Direct Line on my behalf, I am not sure what he said, but when I rang the next morning they said they were writing out the check at this very minute.

So result! Also thanks to saynoto0870.com. I found the Geographic number for the East Sussex police here so the time spent navigating the Police phone system did not cost me anything.

Incidentally, Direct line have an uninsured driver guarantee "If you are hit by a driver that is uninsured, you will not lose your no claims bonus and it won't cost you a penny".
Two caveats to this -

1. You have to know that it exists, otherwise they stick to the line that you will only get your uninsured loss back when they have successfully taken the other driver to court.

2. A "hit and run"  does not count because the driver  may have been insured!!!