QUITE rightly, MPs are angry at plans to force millions of people to alter their telephone numbers this summer, just four years after numbers across Britain had to be changed. For this is not just a matter of inconvenience. The colossal cost of this kind of shake-up runs into telephone-number sums.

When numbers change, businesses have to print new letterheads and cards, alter all their advertisements, re-paint their vans and lorries and much more. Or lose customers.

Everyone accepts that the sheer growth in the number of phones in the country brings with it inevitable pressure on the finite stock of combinations available for new numbers.

But, like the critical members of the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee which has condemned the latest shake-up, they find it hard to understand why this new and enormously-expensive upheaval is being proposed so soon after the last.

Telephones regulator Oftel warns that if its proposed changes - targeted at all London numbers as well as those in Northern Ireland, Cardiff, Coventry, Portsmouth and Southampton - do not take place next July, London and possibly other cities will run out of number capacity by the summer of next year. But, whether or not this is the case and whether or not there is validity in the MPs' view that there could be a more efficient use of existing numbers or in their suspicions that Oftel's plan to also change freephone numbers is a cover to create new "golden" numbers which it can auction to firms, there is another fundamental aspect to the issue.

That is, even if the changes are necessary and not tainted by commercialism just why are they coming now?

After all, it was only in 1995 that nearly everyone's number was altered by the addition of an extra 1 to the area dialling code because the country was running out of numbers.

Yet, surely, if these these new changes are being advocated for the same reason so soon afterwards, the need for them could have been realised four years ago and they could have been implemented at the same time, saving businesses and individuals the collective fortune they may have to fork out again.

Oftel needs to call up a firm of management consultants.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.