Quote:


Believe me Flutty they understand the issue very well at the Stephen Carter and Kip Meek level at Ofcom although possibly not at the level at which your letter was responded to if you made the error of writing to the mere Ofcom Contact Centre?  I would have hoped that you didn't do that and that you would have written to Stephen Carter if you wanted a sensible reply?

The reason they won't give you a straight answer is because it doesn't suit their agenda to admit they screwed up when they allowed BT to go ahead with NTS or that they completely missed the potential for revenue sharing.  And as for OFTEL being a different outfit well do me a favour but don't at least half of OFTEL's former employees still work at Ofcom.  The reality is that OFTEL to Ofcom was almost no change for many of those concerned.  The big change was for the guys from the Radio Authority and the ITC, most of whom lost their jobs when they were merged into Ofcom.

Basically a lot of hard and nasty people in the commercial world pushed to create 0870 because they hated customers calling them and wanted to make more money out of them.  And as OFTEL/Ofcom has unfortunately always been almost totally corrupted as a regulator by employing so many people from the telecoms industry they have never taken the side of consumers as they are supposed to do.

I think you might get further by writing to your MP with a copy of your letter and getting him to ask parliamentary questions about why it was ignored etc.

Just a suggestion

I am still awaiting a reply from Ofcom to my letter of Februry, they managed to lose half of the original letter, despite it being sent Recorded Delivery. The second letter never arrived, again sent Recorded Delivery. Royal Mail state that 'Large Companies' cannot sign for individual letters, therefore I cannot prove one way or another IF they got it, so sending anything Recorded Delivery is a total waste of money and time. They did get my third letter intact, but of course I am now awaiting a reply.

Of more interest is this extract from an Ofcom document:

Quote:

I was actually searching for the rules regulating the USE of 0845 / 0870 etc numbers. It appears that it is quite clear that these numbers should ONLY be used for 'Value Added Services', therefore not just in place of what was originally a geographic number.
The BBC Information Line could, I suppose, be a genuine case of an added value.
But certainly not when you get exactly the same service that was provided on the previous geographic number.
Has anyone out there followed this line of questioning?

It seems that my letter from 1995 could be very valuable, if Ofcom have been allowing the use of these number groupings for the wrong purposes for the last 10 years.

more soon

Flutty

Hi Flutty

The National Audit Office has a supervisory role in Ofcom’s procedures.
Send the details of the “lost letters” to them.  John.Bourn@nao.gsi.gov.uk.

Quote from the Ofcom web site:
"7.2.1      Ofcom will be externally audited and monitored by the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)."