Ian G wrote on Mar 8^th, 2014 at 11:29pm:


And what will happen if they don't?

Will the Information Commissioner perhaps eventually prosecute only the single leading offender for non compliance after another 10 years of blatantly continuing to ride the revenue share gravy train..............

NGMsGhost wrote on Mar 10^th, 2014 at 11:18am:

CJT-80 wrote on Jun 5^th, 2014 at 9:41pm:


Come, come let us not get carried away CJT-80.  The European Consumer Rights Directive is required to be transposed in to law in the Member States from June 13th 2014.  See http://ec.europa.eu/justice/consumer-marketing/rights-contracts/directive/index_...  According to lawyers http://www.eversheds.com/global/en/what/articles/index.page?ArticleID=en/tmt/con... this has been transposed in to UK law by various pieces of legislation all of which require compliance only by the last possible day on June 13th 2014.  According to Eversheds website "Businesses who provide consumers with a telephone line for the purposes of contacting them in connection with their contracts will not be able to charge the consumer more than the applicable basic rate for that call.  For those businesses who operate one telephone line for all enquiries (whether pre-contract or post-contract), steps will need to be taken to ensure that the number being used complies with these requirements."

So this is the only reason John Lewis is changing away from the ripoff numbers their idiot Managing Director Andy Street so stupidly allowed against the whole ethos under which the John Lewis partnership was founded and not because they are good guys or wanting to do the right thing.  They are only changing at the last possible minute to avoid being prosecuted for breaking a UK law as a result of a new EU Directive's implementation.

Moreover John Lewis are not switching back to their nice memorable previous 01 and 02 numbers but are using devious and sneaky 03 numbers.   The bad thing about 03 numbers is that their charging structure is completely different from 01 and 02 numbers and basically they are considerably more expensive for the originating telco and the only reason UK telcos include them in call plans and charge them at 01/02 rates is because an Ofcom General Condition says they have to.

However sitting out here for a few weeks in Spain on holday I can call UK 01/02 numbers for 1 Euro cent per minute plus 30 cents connection with www.orange.es on their SIM Mundo plan but they don't include 03 numbers in this rate and now charge them at either their VAS 1 rate at 50 Euro cents per minute or their VAS rate at 3 Euros per minute. Not even that is clear from their entry against Reino Unido at www.simmundo.es/   I don't know which because Orange makes no announcement of the extra charge before calling and all I do know is that they previously charged 03 numbers last year at up to 19.2 Euros per minutes as a Premium Rate number (the same rate as charged to the most expensive UK sex chat and lawyer advice lines) and only after several complaints to the Chief Executive of France Telecom (the owning company of Orange Spain as Orange Spain's own CEO Jean-Marc Vignolles, another Orange France Frog seconded to run the Spanish outfit, repeatedly ignored my emails) were these lower rates to non standard UK numbers that do not start 01 and 02 adopted.

Once the Consumer Rights Directive takes effect I may well begin pursuing the fact that it is still not being complied with for consumers calling between one member state and another by many telecoms providers.  This could ultimately put the call recipient (John Lewis) in breach of the EU Directive if not in breach of its transposition in to UK legislation.   If I am a John Lewis customer and need to call them from Spain (another EU Member State) about a product I have bought from them while in the UK then surely the Directive itself is still being breached.

It has to be said that this tomfoolery with the ripoff on 03 numbers seems to be confined to www.orange.es as neither www.vodafone.es or Spanish Voip supplier www.neteck.es seem to be charging more for a UK 03 number than to a UK 01 or 02 number.

But for as long as this situation persists companies who use 03 numbers must apply pressure on Ofcom and the EU Commission to bring this disgraceful continued cross border breaching of the EU Consumer Rights Directive by some greedy telcos to an end.

So in short no points at all to John Lewis for only changing at the last possible minute and for now only using 03 numbers that cannot be guaranteed to be included in standard call packages to UK landlines when calling the UK from another EU Member State.

Ian G wrote on Jun 6^th, 2014 at 7:46am:


But the EU Commission clearly does have such control via their requirement for say the Spanish government to properly transpose the Consumer Rights Directive in to Spanish law.

If a UK telco was over charging to call a standard rated number in another EU country Ofcom could in principle take action against them.  It is that kind of action in reverse which we need to see by the Spanish telecoms regulators.

Ofcom also has tremendous unofficial power to influence things behind the scenes as with persuading BT to change its ripoff new minimum fee for using a credit/debit card from a BT PayPhone of £6.50 compared to the former £1.20 and only a still current 60p for cash.  It only took a friendly call from Ofcom to BT after Radio 4 You and Yours began investigating the matter for BT to revert its pricing to the old £1.20 amount and agree to refund all the customers who had paid the extortion £6.50 rate in the interim.

Orange is a very big brand and I am quite sure Ofcom can apply pressure to them to persuade them they are being silly by charging much more to call UK 03 numbers than UK 01 and 02 numbers.  Alternatively perhaps I need to persuade You and Yours to run another editorial piece on this ripoff to warn anyone who is going to be on holiday in Europe this summer and needs to call a UK 03 customer service number of the potential scam that is still going on post the EU Consumer Rights Directive becoming live.

I suspect this practice of over chargng to UK 03 numbers compared to 01 and 02 from other EU countries will in fact unfortunately turn out to be widespread.

By the way I proposed the concept of the 03 number range to Ofcom at a meeting with them in the mid 2000s.  I told them that the call centres and not consumers should pay the extra for the benefits on call routing and call statistics they derive from these numbers (shortly afterwards they came up with their 03 number proposals).  What I didn't expect was that it would also cost the originating telco more to connect a call to an 03 number than to an 01 and 02 number and for them to have to swallow the difference in price.

That is why Orange Spain for instance is behaving in the way that it is behaving in still wanting to charge more for a call to an 03 rather than to a UK 01 and 02 number.

CJT-80 wrote on Jun 6^th, 2014 at 9:36am:


But John Lewis and Nationwide are too mutually owned type organisations (ok with John Lewis the mutuality is with their own staff but most of them only earn modest wages so realise the importance of not having to ring a ripoff 084/7 number at premium rates compared to greedy main board PLC fatcats who normally have a company provided mobile that they also use for all their personal calls) whom it was unthinkable would ever use non 01/02 numbers to begin with.  Yet incredibly they both did so great was the greedy and forceful salesmanship and the bribes offered by the telcos to switch to using the devil's own spawn.

Why should we congratulate either body for changing to 03 numbers only at the very last possible moment.

By contrast Tesco, who are a normal commercial PLC with shareholders, deserve some credit for having changed all their numbers to 03 several months early.

HMRC deserve very little credit indeed as they were also another body who it was unthinkable would ever use 084/7 numbers and they resisted changing to 03 for many years despite longstanding public pressure for them to do so.

John Lewis have only done the minimum at the last moment (given that it would be impossible for them to distinguish between a sales and support or a customer service call the way they tend to operate) so we should note the change but not applaud them on it.

I do not wish to take sides in an argument, but I will offer some relevant personal comments.

I am very disappointed at the pace of change by the John Lewis Partnership and the failure to apply it to their financial services operations. I was led to expect more.

I try never to apply moral attributes to corporate institutions - they are not people. Individuals who own and manage them are people, but their personal characteristics are inevitably generally lost in combination with those of others. When one is pleased by something happening it is natural to offer congratulations to whoever may be seen as being responsible. This may however be taken as being ironic when the action is nothing more than complying with a legal duty. When applied to a corporation it is essentially meaningless.

The fair telecoms campaign is seeking to influence media coverage of the forthcoming (13 June) deadline and the action being taken by very many traders in order to comply. We will highlight those who have not complied. This is to represent the many individuals who have pressed for this over many years - whether invited to represent them or not.

I am not unduly concerned about the way in which telephone companies shuffle money between themselves; I am only concerned about any effect this has on either end. There is a genuine problem with Orange Spain and +443 numbers, and I am interested to know if the same effect is seen elsewhere. Campaigning resources are very limited and heavily committed to high priority matters at present. I will however be delighted to work with anyone in pressing this matter through whichever channel is best able to offer a potential resolution. This could be matter for the Commission - we are looking at national implementations of the relevant provisions of the CRD across the EU and there could be an international angle to this as well.

As a campaigner it can sometimes be frustrating to find that one has been placed in the wrong, because one's target has been taken away. Comments in this thread perhaps demonstrate two different reactions to that situation. The value of this website is being seriously undermined by the successes that are being achieved. Those who saw the misuse of expensive telephone numbers as a vehicle for an attack on particular businesses and politicians, or business and politicians in general, will perhaps have to look elsewhere. Those who sought only to address this issue may prepare to retire satisfied. The fair telecoms campaign will see this one through to the end, notably through and beyond implementation of the "unbundled tariff", but has many other issues on its agenda.

(Readers are free to judge the above as meaningless waffle or thoughtful comments!)

isdoo wrote on Jun 8^th, 2014 at 6:11pm:

Only from a UK consumer point of view calling only other UK 03 numbers and only because an Ofcom General Condition says they must be charged the same as calls to 01/02 numbers, even though they still involve higher costs for the Originating telecoms supplier than calls to an 01/02 number.

Due to these higher costs most discounting overseas call carriers will not connect calls to UK 03 numbers at the same price as to UK geographic (01/02) meaning that most major call centre users of 03 numbers are forced to also offer an 01/02 number for calling from abroad.  They don't want to have to do this because the 01/02 call cannot be monitored and routed in call handing terms and included in their call origination statistics as easily as an 03 NGN can be.

There didn't need to be anything wrong with 03 numbers but Ofcom unfortunately permitted it because the NGN industry complained it couldn't possibly have any kind of NGN where it did not manage to take some extra revenue on the call compared to boring old cheap 01/02 numbers.  So 03 numbers were allowed to have a different charging structure on the origination side compared to 01/02 even though all the extra costs should have fallen only on the receiving party (call centre).

We all pay for this via for instance the ever higher monthly line rental.  This keeps going up way above inflation for various reasons including BT Wholesales's naked greed and Ofcom's unfitness for purposes as a regulator in keeping prices down for consumers.  However one of the main reasons line rental has to keep going up is due to the greater cost for telecoms companies in connecting calls to 03 numbers compared to 01/02, traffic growing fast to these 03 numbers every single month and yet them always being covered by the so called "free" evening/weekend inclusive calling plans offered by many telcos as justification for the ever higher ripoff monthly line rental charge.

At what financial cost? ...or cost to their reputation?