TELEPHONE SERVICE, SHEFFIELD (Hansard, 24 March 1959)

§ Sir Peter Roberts (Sheffield, Heeley)
This debate concerns the finances and operation of the Sheffield telephone area. At the start, I should like to pay tribute to the Post Office and telephone service in Sheffield. We are proud of the way in which that service is run, and we were glad when my hon. Friend the Assistant Postmaster-General visited Sheffield recently in his official capacity.
I last raised this matter five years ago, and at that time there were 2,500 people waiting for telephones. I am glad to say that the figure is now less than 200. That reflects great credit on those who run our affairs. A friendly telephone service is already a fact in Sheffield. I raise this matter again because I feel that my hon. Friend did not give me the necessary figures for my argument about the income and expenditure in the Sheffield telephone area. After a great deal of trouble I have been able to find them out for myself. They are figures which were given to the Post Office Advisory Committee, to the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and to other bodies. If these figures have been published in this form, I cannot understand why they could not have been given to me.
These are the figures so far as I have been able to work them out, and I should like my hon. Friend to confirm whether they are right. Up to the year ending March, 1957, the expenditure figure was £711,000 and the revenue £2,228,000. For 1958–59, the expenditure is likely to be £780,000 and the income £2,500,000. In November of last year I asked the Postmaster-General what were the receipts and outgoings. I did not ask for a profit and loss account but for these particular figures. I was told I could not have the figures because they were misleading. I was not even allowed to decide whether or not they were misleading, I was just not allowed to have them. I made that request in the form of a Written Parliamentary Question, and in January I put down another Question asking for the receipts and outgoings, when my hon. Friend said that I could not 1291 have the figures because they were not compiled.
If these figures can be given to the Post Office Advisory Committee, why cannot they be given to a Member of Parliament? I hope—I say this more in sorrow than in anger—that it is not because my hon. Friend thinks he cannot be bothered to give these figures to the House. It would be a sad thing were that the case. I would point out to him that in my constituency there are 75,000 Sheffield people and I feel that he should go out of his way a little to get these figures for them. In any event, I hope that tonight he will not continue to frustrate me.
The main point of this debate so far as I am concerned is to take the figures I have given and relate them to the question of the shared telephone service. If I am right in my calculations, making allowances for the payment to the operators which are paid through the head postmaster's account, and making certain allowances for overhead changes from Leeds and in London, I should say there is a surplus in the neighbourhood of £200,000 to £300,000 coming from the Sheffield telephone area. If I am right. I should have thought it prudent business to see that that area was encouraged and extended.
At the moment, 12,000 people have residential telephones on a single line and 8.000 are sharing a line. I suggest that that proportion is too high. The main object of this debate is to ask my hon. Friend if he cannot do something further to help those who are on shared lines. I admit that many of these people want to be on a shared line. I am not discussing those but only those who do not wish to be on a shared line. I ask if he has any idea what those numbers are. I have been given a figure of only 5 per cent., in which case it would amount to only 400 people.
From the point of view of the Post Office it is good business to have a shared line. A single line costs £12 and a shared line twice £10, so the Post Office gets £20, but this is a public service and that is not the criterion by which the mind of the Postmaster-General should operate. I ask that some immediate action should be taken to assist us in Sheffield in view of the figures I have 1292 quoted to see that those who wish to have a single line and are on a shared line should be given this opportunity.
I am not alone in this. I will quote from the very good publication in Sheffield called "Quality" in which the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce has expressed a fear that, in spite of the declared intention of successive Postmasters-General ultimately to provide freedom of choice of the single line, the telephone authorities might come to regard compulsory sharing as an established policy merely because it has been in operation for so long. Unless the administration were reminded that compulsory sharing should be abolished as soon as practicable the matter might ultimately be overlooked.
I wish to re-emphasise that and hope that the Postmaster-General and my hon. Friend will not overlook this point and let it run on indefinitely. I hope my hon. Friend will not hide behind the rule of uniformity—that the country as a whole must be kept at a level. I suggest that some areas are more go ahead than others and some staff teams are more go ahead than others. The engineering staff in Sheffield is one of the most efficient teams in the country. We are very proud of the achievements of that team and do not feel we should be handicapped or held back.
If we are a profitable area, as I suggest we are, we should be encouraged. If Sheffield is in this fortunate position the public of Sheffield should get some of the benefit. I ask my hon. Friend to speak to the Postmaster-General and ask him to give what I believe in telephone terms is called a flexible route and not hold back the efficient areas because other areas are not so far forward. I also ask the Minister to clear up the problem of shared lines, particularly where they are wanted, and that if in future I ask for similar figures of this kind, my hon. Friend will allow me to have them if they are available.

§ The Assistant Postmaster-General (Mr. Kenneth Thompson)
I hope to deal with the specific points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Sir P. Roberts). First I take the question of the figures for which he asked and over which I am sorry to discover he is so aggrieved. I suppose it 1293 would be possible to produce a set of figures for any or all operations to prove any or almost any of a number of contentions. It would not be difficult to abstract from the trading figures of the Post Office something which would satisfy my hon. Friend's intention, namely, to have a figure which would lead him to believe that he had been confirmed in his suspicion that Sheffield was a profitable telephone area. I beg him not to fall into this trap of his own making.
Although it is possible to provide figures of one kind or another, they would not he figures which would enable my hon. Friend to proceed further from them. The Post Office is a national undertaking. It operates in every town and village in this country, both in postal and telecommunications matters. Whether my hon. Friend likes it or approves of it or not, the Post Office operates on a basis of uniformity of charges, as directed by this House. It operates from a headquarters here in London, from regional headquarters at nine centres over the country, and for its telephone operations it operates from 57 telephone areas. But the telephone areas are divided again into 600 groups of telephone exchanges, and the groups themselves contain in all 6,000 exchanges.
Some may be more profitable because of their greater use. Some may be less used than others, perhaps because of their remoteness. perhaps because of the sparsity with which the telephone users are scattered about a big area, or perhaps because there are a few long lines in an area compared with a greater concentration of short convenient lines. It may he that an area is profitable because it makes a lot of use of trunk circuits and provides a large trunk revenue for the Post Office. Another area may make only little use of the profitable trunk lines.
It may well be that Sheffield, taking any one of these criteria, is better than some other areas. But if my hon. Friend wants to proceed from that to conclude that the Post Office should enter with wild enthusiasm into an expansion of the telephone service in Sheffield. let me caution him with a warning. Sheffield may be all these things. I know his city and admire it well. It may be all these things, and perhaps the Post Office is making 1294 a handsome profit out of telephone transactions in Sheffield. But there are other areas in the country which, taking my hon. Friend's own basis, are doing even better. Suppose that there are ten areas which are in front of Sheffield, or, perhaps twenty such areas. There are Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff—all bigger areas, more highly concentrated, and perhaps more active areas. There is certainly London, in which all the telephone areas will be more active and profitable than Sheffield. Sheffield might not be at the bottom of the list, but it would not be at the top. If the Post Office is to concentrate its available resources on the basis my hon. Friend suggests, Sheffield might do worse. not better, than it has done until now.

§ Sir P. Roberts
I hope that my hon. Friend will appreciate and give credit for the operations in Sheffield, which I understand to be, even on his own admission, highly successful.

§ Mr. Thompson
Yes, I am coming to that. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for paying his tribute to those who operate our service in Sheffield and to the results which they have achieved in recent years. It is a striking fact that the waiting list has been reduced as it has, and new subscribers have been joined, and continue to be joined, to the system at the present rate. We hope to join 2,500 new subscribers during 1959–60. It is a striking tribute to the policy of the Post Office to develop this area that we have it now entirely mechanised, with the exception of about eight exchanges. It is a striking fact that we have invested £3½ million in the area during the last five years. That is hardly starvation diet for one telephone area out of 57 telephone areas in the country. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for recognising that we have been able to do a great deal.
The fact is that we have to try to devote our resources, which are not unlimited, not merely on the basis of fairness but on the basis of the developing telephone service of the nation as a whole. We try to do it in a way which will produce the most fruitful results not only in terms of profit but also in terms of service to all the people of the country.
What my hon. Friend suggests would, I am sorry to say, be a retrograde step. 1295 My right hon. Friend the Postmaster-General has devoted great energy and imagination to bringing the telephone servise from its position of a collection of 6,000 separate exchanges, each operating its own list of charges, each working more or less in its own area as if it were isolated from its neighbours and the rest of the network, into the conception of groups of exchanges covering, for a basic local call charge, an area averaging about 900 square miles; and subsequently to the conception of the nation as a whole served by one vast local call network.
We initiated this in December last in Bristol, when Her Majesty the Queen made the first subscriber trunk dialled call for 2d. from Bristol to Edinburgh. The development of the service is to be on those lines so that the whole country becomes a local call area where charges will be simplified, bills will be rendered in simplified form, and the whole of the operation of keeping in touch with one another from Sheffield to London or from London to Sheffield or from Sheffield to the remotest hamlet in the land will be easy, convenient and cheap.
I very much hope that my hon. Friend, bearing in mind the motto of the great city he represents here, "Work flourishes with God's help," will believe that we in the Post Office are doing our very best to give to his constituents a satisfactory and economic service and to himself an opportunity of feeling that we are doing our best with the resources at our command and in the time available.

§ Sir P. Roberts
I hope my hon. Friend will deal with the question of shared lines and will give some hope to those 400 people I mentioned.

§ Mr. Thompson
I wish to deal with that most important question my hon. Friend raised.
That shared service should be visited upon someone who does not want it as distasteful to the Post Office as it is to the customer. We have no desire at all that any of our subscribers should have this inflicted on them if they do not want it. Nevertheless, we are driven by the necessities of the situation every now and then to ask people to share a line in order that someone else can enjoy the facility of the telephone which otherwise would not be available to him. It is not unreasonable. There are 600,000 people in the country today linked by the telephone service who are, therefore, in touch with everyone else, who, without shared service, would not be able to be linked in that way.
Whenever we can, as we have stated in a White Paper on telephone policy, we hope people will be offered and will take advantage of the choice of having either shared service or exclusive service, whichever they want. If we are some distance away from being able to make that as widely available as we should like, as we whittle away the waiting lists in various areas it becomes increasingly possible for us to do so. I should like my hon. Friend to feel that the day is not so very far away when that choice will be available to his constituents. I am happy to tell him that there are fewer people in Sheffield telephone area sharing lines today than was the case twelve months ago, and we intend to go on trying to produce the situation which my hon. Friend so ardently and properly desires.