Quote:It may be that it is written in the contract that the surgery must not disclose the number. It could also be a VoIP system, in which case there will be no alternative.
In my position as a local district councillor I have recently been challenging our Head of IT over his setting up of two 0845 numbers in connection with our new dual wheely bin recycling friendly refuse collection scheme. The use of 0845 numbers was never specifically approved by any councillor or council committee and are our first non geographic numbers, apart from an 0845 number for a new telephone bill payment system that our same head of IT introduced about 3 months ago using the excuse that the out of house supplier of this platform did not offer geographic numbers, and that the only other possible option would have been an 0800 number, which would have cost the council a small fortune.
His excuse for using 0845 numbers for the wheely bin scheme (actually answered by council staff in the council offices and not outsourced) is that to have known the real geographic phone numbers at the time the leaflets were printed would have required him to have ordered the additional fixed phone lines supporting this service for our DDI PBX from BT several months early, thereby incurring additional phone line rental costs for which he did not have authority. But he just simply seems to refuse to accept (a vision of an ostritch springs to mind) that 0845 calls are vastly more expensive for many of our residents than calls to geographic phone numbers, especially those poorest citizens who need to use a BT phone box to make an 0845 call. He also seems to be unaware of the existence of intelligent call routing on geographic phone numbers which the latest guidance from the COI now confirms does exist (see
www.coi.gov.uk/documents/ccg-update.pdf). Although I bet that geographic Intelligent Call Routing would have to be paid for by the call recipient rather than being offered "free" (or rather at the caller's expense) as happens with 084/087.
One interesting point that did emerge from all this though was that the 0845 numbers we are using allegedly do not have a geographic DDI equivalent and that supposedly this will only be available when BT lines specifically allocated to the team involved are installed. I actually find this rather hard to believe but that is what I have been told.
Does anyone have any idea how Ofcom is going to jump on this one? It must upset them that things have now got too hot even for the BT board on this even though Vodafone have of course put in a predictably sickening response saying that there is no need for any change and that most of their customers think that using a mobile phone represents remarkabable value for money!