Union Calls for Gpo to Make Own Plant

from Ian ‘Walker. Manufacturers of telephone equipment, as well as the Post Office, are to blame for the decline in quality of Britain's telephone service, the Post Office Engineering Union says in a sharply critical report out this week, It thinks the G.P.0. would benefit from making its own equipment. Surveying the last decade of tele-communications, the report talks of a highly profitable service starved of money, bedevilled by inaccurate forecasting and burdened with old plants susceptible to breakdown, The ring of four firms which has supplied 99 per cent of exchange equipment in recent years - Standard Telephones and Cables, Associated Electrical Industries, General Electric and Plessey - is said to have been apparently disinterested in the potential growth of the market. This stemmed from their certainty of receiving orders, which will total more than £60m, this year, In February the union told the Industrial Reorganization Corporation that development of a telephone service was held up by shortage of exchange equipment: out of 1,250 current contracts, it said, 900 were behind delivery date. “Surprisingly the manufacturers relied completely on Post Office forecast", the union says, "The possibility of a real breakthrough in demand has existed at least since the beginning of the 1960s and the manufacturers ought to have been aware of this," The G.P.0. has already decided to end next year the ring system for ordering telephone apparatus... The union wants the exchange equipment monopoly deal ended at the same time. It also sees a strong prima facie case for the G.P.0. going farther and making its own equipment, as urged in the White Paper on the reorganization of the Post Office. Time and again the report returns to inaccurate forecasting. A 1963 White Paper said the waiting list for phones - then 44,000 - would be eliminated by March, 1966. By last December it had risen to 122,000. Of these people 53,000 had been waiting for more than two years: 106,000 were delayed solely by lack of exchange equipment, The union talks about an increase in faults due to the failure of the system, An independent survey showed that by the summer of 1965, 21 per cent of S,T.D. trunk calls were going wrong, compared with 11 per cent via the operator, Trunk calls from London were less reliable than from elsewhere, For local calls, the average failure rate was 8 per cent. In response to a union demand the G.P.0O, will now attempt to overcome these faults by placing maintenance before new connexions. The report shows that compared with other countries, Britain is just not phone conscious. Of 18 countries listed, only Denmark and Norway had smaller increases than Britain's 63 per cent rise in the last 10 years to a total of 11,2m. phones, Having dredged through the public and private failures, the union concludes there is tremendous growth potential - for telephones, for telex, for data transmission and processing. Hopefully it adds: "If the Post Office is prepared and able to seize the opportunities, really substantial progress is possible in the next 15 to 20 years,"