Telephone Service (Capital Expenditure) (Hansard, 18 December 1947)

§ Mr. Wilfred Paling

The reduction in the labour ceiling and the restriction of capital expenditure will seriously affect Post Office capacity to provide telephone buildings, exchange equipment and local cables. Our first concern, after providing for the connection of subscribers to whom service is really essential in the national interest, will be to give a satisfactory standard of service on the trunk system. This is of paramount importance to the efficiency of industry in general. Some of the plant has already exceeded its normal life and can only be kept working with great difficulty. This plant will have to be replaced and this involves new buildings or the extension 413W of existing buildings. Additional plant in the exchanges and additional cables are needed to cater for the continuing growth of trunk traffic. All work of this character will be given first priority.

Next preference will be given to the maintenance of the local telephone service. Normal maintenance was seriously restricted during the war and the automatic plant was subjected to great strains, particularly in London and other large centres which suffered bombing. It is a great tribute to the quality of British workmanship that this delicate plant should have continued to function so well as it has, but there is now need for a complete overhaul to get rid of intermittent faults and to improve the standard of service. I am sorry to say that many manual exchanges due for conversion to automatic working in the near future will have to remain in service for some years to come, although they are giving, and must be expected to give, rise to a good deal of trouble in the meantime. This is particularly unfortunate in the London area, where the continuance of joint manual and automatic working presents very difficult problems as the system expands, but the limited resources at our disposal make deferment inevitable.

The margin of spare plant is now so low that the provision of service to new subscribers usually involves the construction of new plant, either ducts and cable or equipment in the exchange or both. We shall continue to provide such new plant within the limits of our resources where service is required for essential users, such as businesses engaged in production for export or for saving imports, public utilities, health services, doctors, and the like. We intend accordingly to employ a larger proportion of our labour and materials than we have done in the past on the provision of service to farmers. We shall increase the limits which are applied to the expenditure of labour and materials in such cases, and shall in future provide service, if exchange and cable capacity permit, where an individual extension will not require more than 15 poles. If more than 15 poles are required the case will be decided on its merits, after consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture. We have at present some 11,000 orders from farmers outstanding, and I am hopeful that the supply of material available to us may enable us to meet 414W the bulk of these in the course of the next two years.

I am afraid that after meeting the demands mentioned above there will be little spare capacity available in local exchanges or cables for the provision of service to other applicants, such as the residential subscriber. Where spare plant is available we shall continue to provide service, but we shall not be able to construct new plant for the purpose in such cases. We shall take steps to exploit more fully the utilisation of existing plant by such devices as party line service, and I accordingly propose that for the future all residential applicants for new or transferred service shall be required to accept liability to share their lines. I am also arranging, as far as possible, to accelerate delivery of kiosks, with their associated components. This will enable us to provide more public telephone facilities in areas where we cannot supply the normal plant for subscribers' service.