Those were the days. When you eventually got to the top of the queue for a landline of your very own, a GPO engineer would call to inspect your house & decide where the handset could go – one of the important criteria was that the bell should be audible from as many rooms as possible – hence the custom of putting the phone in the cold draughty hall rather than by the fire in the cosy sitting room. I know because my father was a telephone engineer & when I was very young I sometimes went with him on these visits.
Fast forward to 1976, the year of the IMF cuts. I think Telephones had been hived off from the Royal Mail side of the Post Office, but were still a nationalised industry. Years of underinvestment, with the consequence that there was still a waiting list for home phones & the system struggled to cope with the demand from business users. One tactic adopted was to charge more for all phone calls made at the busiest time of day, from 10.30am to 1pm.
Civil servants were instructed that, in the interests of reducing the deficit, calls to outside numbers should not be made at these times, save in exceptional circumstances.
I wondered if it really did help to have one bit of government reduce the income of another part of the public sector in this way.
I have been having similar thoughts about the new ban on first class travel for civil servants. I am hazy about the details, but I believe that the government still subsidises rail travel in various guises. Has anyone worked out whether the loss of income to rail companies from the loss of all that first class revenue will, in the end, bring about any meaningful ruction in the deficit? [Leave that typo - Ed]
My father took the early retirement offered as part of the 1976 cuts, with a slightly enhanced pension. This went a little way to soothing another long standing grievance – that he received no pension credit for his war service because on leaving the army he took up a new career as an engineer rather than go back to his pre-war employer, Martins Bank.
Related post
