BT’s Caller Display: would you pay to know who’s calling?

The best thing to do is to send an email to the Select Committee Chairman to express your annoyance. They are conducting an enquiry into nuisance calls and have yet to report. If a dozen people write to him I think he would sit up and listen. He is at john.whittingdale.mp@parliament.uk
I have sent the the email below.
You can modify as you see fit.

Subject Nuisance calls

Dear Mr Whittingdale
I am writing to you as I understand you are involved with the select committee that is investigating nuisance/spam telephones calls.

I am concerned to hear that BT will to be charging £21 per year for their privacy at home option. I have had to purchase devices to block nuisance calls for my mother and mother in law, both 88 years old, to give them some peace from these calls. In 11 month my mother’s device has blocked over 410 calls. Recently she has been receiving, on average, 4 unsolicited calls per day. These devices rely on the caller ID being available which is now going to cost them an additional £21 per year on top of the increased rental charges from BT.

In addition to this people buying the BT6500 reasonably assumed that they would not have to pay any additional running costs. The phone costs £45, so an unexpected annual bill of £21 per year to use it, is a proportionally huge additional cost. BT must have known about these plans for some time but still carried on selling their phone in this way – in fact they have just launched a big button version for their older customers.
Argos and Amazon are the biggest sales channels for cordless phone. In their adverts for the BT6500 phone neither seems to mention the Caller Display service so anyone buying a BT6500 from them cannot reasonably expect to be charged for Caller Display. They may both be committing an offence with their adverts (ie when buying the BT nuisance call blocking range of phones the cost of a Caller Display service is an implied contract term that isn’t made explicit to the consumer).
BT have around 10 million residential lines – assuming that half of these have caller-display turned on this could generate a £100m annual bill for consumers.
The service is already there, the infrastructure is in place and the development is already paid for – what is the justification for the additional cost? They will argue that they have been subsidising their customer to the extent of £100m a year since 2005. This doesn’t wash since Sky and TalkTalk provide it free.
I believe in their written evidence to the Select Committee they said that they provide customers with products and services to block nuisance calls including :-
‘BT Privacy at Home’, a service that includes free Caller Display and registration with the Telephone Preference Service’.
They must have known that the price rises were in the system these price increases were due when they said this, so they were not being clear with the Select Committee.
I see this as BT profiteering from people’s misery. They are already making money from these calls.
Could you please let me know what action you may be able to take to prevent these charges from going ahead?

When I receive calls from Ireland, the message on caller display shows ‘International Call’ rather than the caller ID. This is apparently as Ireland have not signed some agreement. When I mention this to the telecom provider in Ireland ‘Eircom’ they know nothing of this. Meanwhile BT blocks all numbers from Ireland. Do we need a telecomunicayion peace process?
Really BT, you are unbelievable and so arrogant!

I used to work in software development in the Telecomms industry so know that charging for caller id is a big rip off. In order to switch it on or off to any given telephone number is just a single field (just a one bit field – there are 8 bits in a byte) in one of the “messages” which set up telephone calls which would take all of 30 seconds to activate/deactivate so there is virtually zero cost involved in providing this service.
How they can justify £1.75 a month for this is beyond me.

Better off finding a cheaper provider bt are expensive