I’m a disabled pensioner and recently incurred an £80 mobile phone bill by calling my local authority emergency out-of-hours adult care department. I made several calls that day, being in extremis, and it has a queuing system which you have to wait on while the seasons change. If I’d known it was going to cost that much, I might have just waited until somebody noticed they hadn’t seen me around for a few weeks. How can it justify a premium-rate number for essential services?
PC, Devizes, Wiltshire
You called an 0845 number which is a business rate at up to 7p a minute plus whatever access charge your service provider levies. Charges can rack up, although £80 is startling.
However, since then Wiltshire council has changed to an 0300 number, which costs the same as a standard landline. It says: “We now only advertise the 0300 number. As soon as we were made aware the householder had incurred these charges, we quickly moved to refund them.”
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