Ofcom is directly responsible for regulating the accuracy of the content
of phone bills from all the large telecoms companies but has done
precisely nothing whatsoever to stop phone companies from still calling
0870 and 0845 numbers "national rate" and "local rate" on their phone
bills when they are no such thing.  The telecoms side of Ofcom does not
seem to be on the side of protecting consumers at all but only on the
side of protecting the profits and revenues of the telecoms companies.  
Ofcom also seems highly schizophrenic in terms of its approach to
interfering with business and its operation as they have just come down
very hard indeed with large fines on broadcasters of encrypted pay adult
satellite channels who have made inadvertent errors in allowing material
to be transmitted that is more hard core than Ofcom broadcasting rules
allow (but that is widely available with no restrictions at all on the
internet).  Yet on 084/7 numbers the companies and government
departments who run the call centres involved and the telecoms companies
that customers use to call these numbers repeatedly quite deliberately
mislead consumers right, left and centre over the call cost of 084 and
087 prefixed numbers (often still wrongly calling them "local rate" or
"national rate" calls) but Ofcom does precisely nothing whatsoever about
it.  Ofcom also previously announced that 0871 numbers costing 10p per
minute would be made fully "premium rate" with call cost announcements
and restrictions on the length of call queues but has now gone back on
this by allowing the premium rate regulator PhonePayPlus (formerly
ICSTIS) to set up a special regime for 0871 numbers in which there are
no pre call price announcements and no restrictions on excessive call
queuing length.  PhonePayPlus promises only that it may do something
about excessive call queues if it receives a lot of complaints.  This is
not much help to someone kept waiting 30 minutes to speak to a call
centres at 10p per minute on their particular 0871call.

Ofcom has also done nothing whatsoever to investigate the clearly cartel
like anti competitive behaviour of all the major UK mobile companies
over all 084 and 087 prefixed numbers where they do not just charge the
real extra cost to them of these calls compared to 01/02/03 numbers but
charge customers vast price premiums that do not reflect just a fair
profit on their underlying extra costs but are simply abusive,
apparently on the basis that many members of the public still do not
understand that 084/7 prefixed numbers costs them vast extra sums to call.

The only way to deal properly with 084 and 087 numbers is for all of
them only to be allowed to be charged at normal call rates and included
in all call package minutes on landlines and mobiles and for anyone who
wants to charge extra for calling their call centre and to make a profit
out of people calling them to use 09 numbers with a clear announcement
to the caller they are being charged extra when they call these numbers.

For nearly all other goods and services in the UK people know the cost
of them before they make a purchase but phone call costs seem to be the
one area of business where this is not true on a massive nationwide
scale.  Even the so called Office of Fair Trading uses an 0845 number
for customers to contact it when if it was following Ofcom advice it
should long ago have switched to an 03 prefixed phone number.

I was sufficiently moved by the the whole thing to send the following email to You & Yours:-

it might have take a forum member with a more combative temperament as well as all the relevant campign history, such as myself or dorf, in order to achieve that.