BT criticised for cost of jail phone calls

Ofcom today announced proposals to curb unfair additional charges levied by communications providers on consumers’ bills.

Consumer organisations are to issue a "super complaint" today against BT over the high charges it makes for prisoners' phone calls, pointing out that a 30-minute call from within a jail can end up costing seven times the amount payable from a public pay phone.

The National Consumer Council, which is backed by the Prison Reform Trust in its complaint, says that phone charges inside prison are so prohibitively expensive that more than half of all calls made by inmates last less than three minutes.

The "super complaint", under the NCC's statutory power under competition law, presses Ofcom to start an investigation into whether the prison phone market is significantly harming consumer interests. The problem of phone charges in prisons in England and Scotland has been the subject of repeated criticism from the prisons ombudsman and from independent monitoring boards.

A pin-based phone system replaced phonecards in jails in England and Wales in 1998 so that inmates could only ring vetted phone numbers. Prisoners can buy pinphone credits in multiples of £1 at the prison shops and canteens. International calls can be made only with £3 and £5 cards.

For prisoners connecting to landlines there is a minimum charge of 10p for 55 seconds. Extra time is charged at 1p for every 5.5 seconds. This compares with 40p for the first 20 minutes from BT pay phones. Calls to mobiles from jails cost 19p to 63p a minute. The NCC says that because of these charges prisoners make fewer, shorter calls; the average lasts only four and a half minutes. A quarter of all calls from prisons are under a minute long and half last less than three minutes.

Prison wages are about £8 a week, so a seven-minute phone call, costing 77p, eats up nearly 10% of an inmate's earnings. More than a quarter of the money spent weekly at prison shops is on phone credits.

Consumer groups hope Ofcom's investigation will disclose the details of an unpublished contract between BT and the Prison Service in England and Wales, and another one between Siemens and the Scottish Prison Service.

Philip Cullum, the National Consumer Council's acting chief executive, said: "We are extremely concerned ... just because the consumers are prisoners it doesn't mean they should be exploited." He said call charges outside prisons had fallen by 60% since the BT Prison Service contract had been signed, yet rates for calls within prisons had remained high "for an outdated service".

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said that almost half the people in prison lost contact with their families, and those without a supportive family network were six times more likely to reoffend after being released.

source: guardian.co.uk 24-06-2008

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