Christopher Booker's Notebook
Daily Telegraph (31/08/2003)

The EU's hidden hand on our telephones

In all the acres of coverage of the great "118 directory inquiries fiasco" one rather significant point was missing. This was an explanation of just why in the first place we had to abolish the old "192" system in favour of a mad multiplicity of call centres providing numbers, often with laughable inefficiency, at up to £2 a time. The answer is that the new system resulted from a European Union directive - yet another example of "hidden Europe", whereby our government does something only because it has been ordered to do so by the EU, but then goes out of its way to conceal the fact.

The abolition of the "192" inquiries service was made mandatory by directive 2002/49 - article 5 of which, headed "directory services", laid down that steps should be taken to ensure that all exclusive rights to provide telephone directories or inquiry services were abolished. This is part of the same "deregulation" policy under which all EU countries were told to adopt the same "112" number for emergencies. In the first year after its introduction to Britain in 1994, this led to 500,000 calls of which only 500 proved genuine. Most were either "silent calls" or resulted from misdialling, yet the police had to waste untold hours answering each one. Fortunately, in defiance of the law, Britain also retained her old "999" system, so the nuisance has since abated.

Last week I reported how a similar policy for postal services has resulted in private firms being allowed to cream off postal business on terms which will lose Royal Mail £650 million a year. Again there was no mention of the fact that this stemmed from an EC directive. There are scores of similar instances of "hidden Europe". Consider, for example, that ministers will never admit that their control of policy on GM crops was surrendered to Brussels in 1990. Similarly, they conceal Britain's outlay of billions of pounds in order to comply with absurd EC standards on water quality - money which could much more usefully be spent on replacing crumbling 19th-century infrastructure.

One of the most glaring examples of "hidden Europe" was the separation of the ownership of rail track from the companies operating the trains, which is widely blamed for the chaos besetting our railway system. It was even vigorously denied that this decision had any connection with the EU, despite the fact that the regulation enacting it was put through under the European Communities Act, to comply with EC directive 91/440.

Oddest of all, however, is the fact that the ministers who go out of their way to conceal all this are supposed to be enthusiasts for the "benefits" Britain derives from the EU. If they are so keen on this new form of government, should they not proclaim how much of our legislation comes from the system they admire, rather than try to hide it?