Vodafone slurps MEELLLIONS for redirecting police hotline calls Vodafone is making more than £2m a year from public reporting of non-emergency crime, and has just landed another three-year contract - charging 15p per non-emergency call to police. Calls made to the non-emergency "101" number are routed by Cable & Wireless to the nearest police authority and dealt with at public expense. All …
I used it to call the local police when on the way to the airport to report a car that I had seen in an 'odd' place. It didn't warrant a 999 call but being able to tell the local police about it was just what I needed, especially as I didn't know who the local police would be as I was out of my area.. The only draw back is that if you had no credit/contract I presume you wouldn't be able to call...
DVLA Premium rate?
Driver Licensing Enquiries
Telephone: 0300 790 6801
Vehicle Registration and Tax enquiries
Telephone: 0300 790 6802
Drivers Medical Enquiries
Telephone: 0300 790 6806 (car or motorcycle), 0300 790 6807 (bus, coach or lorry)
I make those to be freephone numbers. Think we've found one of those people that click on the 1st link they see in Google.
Somehow the call needs to get to my phone to the local Plod so they can get the chance to sit on their arse and do nothing.
Vodaphone do it, but it could be any company. Whoever it is, the service works, it costs me more to phone my banks "free" telephone banking service.....
The numbers here don't seem to be any more inflated than anything else the Government gives out to its cronies on normal contracts (having seen how much one authority was paying 2E2 for a small SAN with little real support and you get the feeling that this country has the same levels of corruption as somewhere like Nigeria)
The Mail on Sunday would do better sending out freedom of information requests asking how many children under 12 in each council are suspected of being farmed off for arranged marriages outside the UK. Now that would be a story that would be worth the paper for them to print.
0845 is Local call rate, no matter where you are calling from in the UK from landlines. Not sure about mobile rates. So it's not really pushing the boat out much. Of course I don't think it comes out of your free minutes on mobiles, so maybe not as good as the mentioned 03x numbers in some cases.
No "local rate", it was "Lo-Call" rate - which happened IIRC to be about the same as a local call, back when calls were always metered.
Today, it is basically an expensive number - on mobile with a few notable exceptions, and a questionable number on a landline depending on the various providers and tariff combinations you have.
0845 used to be local call rate, about 30 years ago when it was first introduced (as 0345 in 1985). There is no such thing as local call rate now, you pay the same between any two parts of the UK. Call rates in general have gone down a lot over the last 30 years, 0845 rates have not and they are now a lowish cost premium rate number (officially "special services, basic rate"). When dial-up Internet first became popular in about 1998, the money ISPs got from modems calling their 0845 numbers was sufficient to fund the service.
I've always used "London local exchange code + 1212" for non-emergency calls and it always seems to work; last used 3 or 4 years ago.
I think the idea sprang from a distant childhood memory of a police radio show called "Whitehall 1212", and an even vaguer memory of XYZ 1212 being printed as the Police number on my Grandmothers seriously ancient Bakelite phone, replete with slide-out pop-up personal phone book, and (personal favourite) one of those half cylinder grille fag holders you used to see in phone boxes. This one was definitely built for comfort, not for speed.
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