loddon wrote on Nov 11
th, 2013 at 1:03pm:
Our doughty campaigner David Hickson appeared on Sky News today at 12.30 to discuss the Public Accounts Committee Report. Again David spoke well but missed an opportunity to make an important point. The newscaster asked "where does the premium money go to ? To the organisation called or to the phone companies?"
David talked about the revenue accruing to the called organisation in some form or other but failed to point out that MOST of the cost accrues as revenue to the phone companies who scandalously overcharge unethically for calls to these numbers.
I am now happily in a position to quote the question and answer referred to, verbatim:
Quote:Anna Jones: Is it true that some of that money will get through to the government, some of it to the companies that operate the phone lines?
DH: It does precisely that; on a 0845 number 2p a minute applies as a discount to the government on the cost of using those numbers; and that's at the expense of callers.
The interview was focussed on the behaviour of the government and the action it needs to take. The important issue of the secondary rip-off perpetrated by telephone companies when greedy service providers present them with the opportunity to further inflate the cost would have been covered if the issue of the extent of the cost to callers had been raised. A review of the fair telecoms campaign news feed will show that other media interviews have raised that point and the impact of the Access Charge is covered.
loddon wrote on Nov 11
th, 2013 at 1:03pm:
We must not concentrate on the Service Charge and omit the major problem of the Access Charge in furthering our arguments.
The Public Accounts Committee report and the news coverage that day concentrated on the Service Charge. Measures to make the Access Charge transparent are coming, but in the meantime, I believe that our campaigning efforts are best focussed on eliminating improper use of 084 numbers, thereby removing both the Service Charge and the Access Charge from calls where neither should be incurred.
With the government firmly in the dock and the Prime Minister being reported as expressing concern, it would not have been politic to imply that the PM had little or nothing to worry about, because the major fault lies with the telephone companies.
It is also worth noting that discussing the current level of Access Charge can become complex with 0845 numbers, because it is highly variable between providers. e.g. for BT it is effectively negative, for Vodafone PAYG it is less than the charge for a call to a geographic rate number, for Virgin Media it is a combination of an irregular connection charge plus a per minute rate rate greater than that for 0844 numbers, for EE it can be 43p per minute!
The "Telephone Tax" imposed by government on callers is constant (for each type of number) and improper. A variable charge imposed by telephone companies on their customers cannot be described as a "tax".
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Public Accounts Committee report Premium Charges (Read 33,302 times)
