We now have an MP claiming that BT has made between £1.49 million and £6.6 million pounds from calls to the UC 0345 helpline but the maths doesn't stack up.
29 Feb 2016:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/28/bt-profiteering-universal-credit-...A recent House of Commons Written Answer states there has been 2.2 million calls with average duration of 7 minutes 29 seconds.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-stateme...This is around 17 million minutes.
If you multiply 17 million minutes by just over 8p per minute (BT's non-inclusive call price without VAT) and add 2.2 million lots of just over 14p (BT's connection fee without VAT) you'll get a figure of £1.54 million. If you're thinking this is BT's revenue, you have misunderstood many things.
Not only have you overlooked the fact that more than 90% of callers will have paid nothing for the call as it fell within their inclusive allowance, you'll have also missed the fact that less than 20% of calls are made from BT landlines. More than 80% of calls to DWP will have originated from some other network... Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin, EE, O2, Three, Vodafone, etc, and they will have billed the caller that used their network.
Multiplying 17 million minutes by 38p per minute (Vodafone's non-inclusive call price without VAT) yields a figure of around £6.6 million. Again, you have overlooked that most calls will have been made as part of an inclusive allowance at zero incremental cost, and quite how Vodafone's call prices are somehow supposed to relate to BT's earnings is a complete mystery. There is no relation. Additionally, Vodafone is unlikely to have carried any more than 15% of calls made and probably substantially less than that. Callers will have mainly used their inclusive allowance. The small number who pay for individual calls will have paid a range of prices from 3p to 45p per minute, depending on provider, and that is what they had already chosen to pay for calls to family and friends.
While most BT customers will have used their inclusive allowance to call the DWP 0345 number, some callers will have paid a per-minute rate to BT for the call. The total of such calls via BT is likely to be much less than 300 000 minutes, and at 10.24p per minute amounts to less than £30K revenue for BT. We are now a very long way from the initial £1.54 million claim.
Other landline and mobile providers will have carried more than 80% of the calls and more than 90% of those calls will have been part of an inclusive allowance. Of the "80%", assuming that 30% were made from landlines and 50% were made from mobiles, these other providers may have seen a total of as much as £45K spread across all of the other landline providers and £200K spread across all of the mobile providers. The real figures are likely to have been substantially less than this.
One thing is clear, anyone paying 12p per minute for calls to 01, 02 and 03 numbers from their landline or 45p per minute for calls to 01, 02 and 03 numbers from their mobile is on the wrong call plan for their needs.
DWP could carry out some research to gauge what type of call plan callers have. Ofcom could widen this to a broader base of phone users. This would settle this once and for all.
Ofcom could work with landline and mobile providers to ensure that their customers are on the right call plan, not making hours and hours of chargeable calls when an inclusive allowance would cover the whole lot for far less money.
Landline providers usually advertise "weekend" deals with expensive weekday rates as well as "anytime" deals that cover calls at any time. Most people need "anytime" inclusive calls - even those who make only an hour of calls per month will be better off on an "anytime" deal than paying for each call. More education around this topic is needed.
So far, we have discovered the revenue accumulated by the retail division of BT is in the tens of thousands or less, but are there any other revenue streams that might flow to BT?
There is one, and it's a normal part of the payments made between networks for carrying each other's calls. These payments are so low, they have no bearing on the retail cost of the calls.
This revenue is the Termination Fee paid to the company that hosts the non-geographic number and who then forwards those calls onwards to their eventual destination callcentre. The Termination Fee for 03 numbers is a maximum of 0.56p per minute. This means the 03 number provider will have received a maximum of around £94K in termination fees for the 17 million minutes of incoming calls. In the case of the DWP UC helpline, the non-geographic provider is the business arm of BT. These payments flow irrespective of what the caller paid for the call, they flow even when the call is inclusive in the caller's allowance.
A provider offering "unlimited" inclusive calls for £8 per month will start to lose money on a particular caller if that caller makes more than about 1400 minutes of calls to 03 numbers per month. Very few people make that amount of calls. The Termination Rate and those interconnect payments have little or no bearing on what callers pay for calls.
The real issue has been overlooked in all of this. The issue is that there is NO claims line for UC, all claims must be made online.
DWP should reverse this policy and allow claims for UC to be made by telephone and provide an 0800 number for this.
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Calls to DWP UC 0345 numbers are NOT premium rate (Read 27,954 times)
