Wrexham Council Spend Over £20,000 on Costly Calls

Wrexham Council Offices Lampit Street

A freedom of information request by Wrexham.com has revealed Wrexham County Borough Council has spent over £20,000 in the last three years on calling premium rate, directory enquiries and the talking clock.

There are no details of what premium numbers were called, PhonepayPlus (formerly known as ICSTIS) defines these as numbers that start 09, 0871, 0872, 0873 or the like. Over the last three years the council spent £11,609.26 on calls to these type of numbers.

Calls to directory enquiries in the same period totalled £8244.52 .

The most surprising find was that Wrexham Council spent £796.07 calling the talking clock. For those who are unfamiliar with this service, you ring it, and it reads out the time to you.

The council did specify that these bills were paid to British Telecom, who charge 31p per use of the talking clock therefore indicating that it was called over 2500 times, or just over twice a day.

Wrexham.com’s useful guide to cost cutting calls:

• To avoid premium rate calls look up a number first on www.saynoto0870.com. This site looks up direct landline numbers for various premium rate numbers, not just 0870. For those with mobiles, there are android and iphone apps that can be installed that does this automatically.
•  Calling directory enquires can be expensive (as we can see above) however a quick google for a company name or address inside “quotes” can often reveal a number.
•  Rather than using the talking clock to find out the current time, Wrexham.com favours our friend Google again! Just search “UK Time” and it tells you at the top, this handy little trick also works for places eg. search “Dubai time” and you can find out the time in Dubai.

All the above services are free to use.

We invite comments on this story as usual, however if you have tips on how to save money on calls please leave a comment below !