idb wrote on Jan 16^th, 2006 at 2:57am:


As I expect you will realise Peter Bottomley only ended up responding to the consultation due to an ongoing email dialogue with a certain Councillor with whom I am also personally rather well acquainted.

I think MPs would have been put off by the pure impenetrability of the consultation document and the total number of such consultations that MPs receive from all over the place every week (they would have all been sent the consultations in hard copy form by Ofcom).  It does however seem disappointing that Lord (formerly Paul) Tyler did not find the the time to put in a formal response though although he, Vince Cable and Andrew Rosindell have all been asking some helpful Parliamentary questions lately.  I think they are asking the wrong questions though.  They should be asking each Minister how much it would cost in a full year for their department to abolish all non geographic phone services operated by the department on 084, 087, 09 or 070 prefixed numbers, including the cost of any reduced price services or discounted equipment presently supplied by the telecoms company as a quid pro quo for the existence of the NGN contract.  Perhaps I need to suggest this to the MPs in question.  I see some departments have actually been quite forthcoming in their responses though whilst others (especially the Inland Revenue/Customs) have resorted to total obfuscation.

Perhaps they will soon be saying that decisions about whether or not to use an NGNs by government departments/agencies should be a matter for experts rather than a matter for government ministers.

I see there is now a response dated December 22nd from the Federation of Communication Services to the Providing Citizens and Consumers with Improved Information...... etc consultation that closed on Dec 6th.  So perhaps there is still time for the Ofcom Consumer Panel to get in a late submission on this one too then?

Perhaps I could put in a late submission on Ofcom's Wholesale Line Rental - Fit for Purpose consultation of a couple of months ago which I missed at the time but with which I take great exception with the conclusions?  Stupidly I had thought that several weeks after the event I might be too late.  What a silly notion when Ofcom take up to a year to assess and report back on responses to most of their consultations.

Perhaps there is still time for you to make a response on the Single National Non-Emergency Number idb as I know that you had intended to make one?  Perhaps there is still time for all those other Police forces in the UK who have not yet responded to the SNEN consultation to do so?

idb wrote on Jan 16^th, 2006 at 12:39pm:


If they refuse to allow it I would point to some of their other generous time extensions on responses and the 10 days that were lost between xmas and New Year.

Perhaps it was because you know you would end up writing 8 pages as I did that the thought of sitting down to do it proved too big a hurdle to cross.