Rip-Off London - Part II

It's 5.30pm on Monday, and after a costly weekend of shopping and eating out, it's time to face the reckoning. You dial the number for "cardholder enquiries" to find out the latest damage to your credit card/bank account.

Twenty minutes later, "your call is being held in a queue". Your call is important, says a voice, it will be answered as soon as possible. Or you are set a long series of touch-phone tasks before reaching a person. You get increasingly angry - along with thousands of others in the queue.

At long last a "customer adviser" comes on, but for the dubious privilege of spending 20 minutes "on hold", you may have paid up to £7 in phone costs. Being held in a call centre queue, as anyone who has queried a bill or booked tickets will testify, can be one of life's most frustrating experiences.

The options can be bewildering, the piped music infuriating, and attempts to reach a person nearly impossible. And as more companies use them, fewer do so with a freephone number. Increasingly they use special lines charging national rates, with part of the charge going to the company itself.

A typical example is HSBC's Visa cardholder enquiry line, where customers are routed to a call centre in Southend via an 0870 number.

This, as the small print notes, means charges are at the national rate.

When tested by the Evening Standard on a weekday, it took 20 minutes to get through. On a normal landline phone, national rate charges are 8p per minute - a bill of £1.60. On a typical mobile, they are about 36p a minute - a total bill of around £7.20.

A spokeswoman for HSBC said: "We handle over 100,000 calls a week and our average response time is within two minutes. Waiting 20 minutes is exceptional, and we would encourage anybody who has done so to let us know."

Most banks apply such charges and, as the phone book or classified ads show, so do many other services: such as buying a cinema ticket via Odeon's centralised service, booking a plane seat via Airtours' Dial-a-Flight, or ringing the Passport Agency.

Bill Mieran is chairman of the Telecom Users' Association, a group that lobbies for the interests of businesses and individuals. He believes consumers get a raw deal from firms that still, despite recent criticism, run call centres with too few staff. "We believe that even a five minute wait is totally unacceptable, although we have all waited far longer than that," he said.

"You might just say 'I won't use the damned thing', but often you don't have that choice - it's a bill or query that you want to sort before you go away on holiday, or whatever."

When call centres first opened a few years ago, he says, most followed the US system of using freephone numbers - typically beginning 0800 - but that is now increasingly rare due to cost considerations.

Companies now vary between those that ask customers to ring an ordinary BT line with a specific area code - Lloyds and NatWest Visa, for example, have a number prefaced 01703 for their Southend call centre - and those which use an 0870 number. While on a standard BT number all charges paid by callers go entirely to BT, on an 0870 number a percentage usually goes towards the company being contacted.

"How much each bank gets will vary on the level of calls, but it can be 10 or even 20 per cent," said Mr Mieran. "I'd say the money contributes towards the cost of the call centre rather than covering it, but you can argue it doesn't give them much incentive to improve.

"All we can do is encourage people to complain. Hopefully companies will eventually take notice," he said.

Part of the problem is that with so many different special-rate numbers - BT has a two-page list of "non-standard" numbers - most people have difficulty remembering whether they are dialling a premium-rate line or a freephone one. Generally, 0345 and 0845 numbers are at local rates, 0990 and 0870 are at national rates, and 0991 numbers are at premium rates (often £1 or more).

Industry group the Call Centre Association insists things are improving. Call centres are encouraged to provide a route straight to an operator and synchronise staffing levels with busy periods. However, if you succumb to "phone rage", there is always another option. "Go to the bank or travel agents in person," says spokesperson Anne Marie Forsyth.