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Neither British Telecom nor OFTEL, the telecommunications watchdog,
can explain why Britain will have had to endure two large-scale reorganisations
of telephone numbers, rather than one. London’s telephone subscribers will
have to spend thousands of pounds on changing their stationery and repainting
shop and vehicle signs for a second time in four years.

Last week, OFTEL announced plans to add on extra digit to the entire
country’s phone numbers over the Easter weekend in 1994. But BT had already
proposed the nationwide change in May 1990, when it split London’s 01 code
into 071 and 081.

The proposed change will add an extra digit after the zero at the beginning
of all 26 million numbers in the UK. So, for example, Edinburgh numbers
will change from 031 to 0131. This addition will increase the reservoir
of numbers tenfold. Although to start with everyone will get an extra 1,
in future the digits 2 to 9 will be allocated to services such as mobile
phones and pagers.

OFTEL took responsibility for numbering from BT on 1 April 1989. But
it had been aware of the plans for the extra digit since 1988. A report
commissioned by Bryan Carsberg, OFTEL’s director-general, gave ‘overwhelming
support’ to the proposal. Despite this, OFTEL let BT double its pool of
London numbers in May 1990.

Last year BT spent more than £30 million educating the public
on the London change. Brian Haigh, BT’s Director of Operations, wrote to
all London subscribers reassuring them that the change would ‘anticipate
your needs well into the future’. Carsberg said the change would ‘provide
the extra numbering capacity that is needed’.

Within months of the London change BT had secretly scheduled a national
change for April 1994 and was confident that OFTEL would endorse it. OFTEL
acknowledges that this scheme was made possible by the London change in
May 1990, which ended the use of 1 as the second digit of any national number.
Both BT and OFTEL claim that there were ‘technical reasons’ why the London
numbers could not be switched from 01 to 0171 and 0181 in May 1990, but
neither has been able to explain these reasons.

BT’s help line, set up to advise on the number change, was last week
blaming OFTEL, saying that BT could not make the one-step change because
OFTEL ‘had not agreed’ the scheme now being proposed. Earlier this year
OFTEL blamed BT, claiming that it was not sufficiently advanced in its exchange
modernisation programme to cope with the extra digit.