About the BT payphone consultation
Consultation closed: 21 January 2020
Consultation opened: 18 December 2019
BT has proposed to remove 30 payphones that it has identified as unnecessary in Central Bedfordshire, whilst retaining those that are still in use or have been categorised as providing a social need.
As part of this proposal, we undertook a community consultation which sought the views of the local community and other public organisations such as town and parish councils; it received 209 responses.
During the first phase of consultation, the number of responses for each phone box was relatively small. However, there was general support for retaining the boxes in villages – either as phone boxes or adopting them for community use. There were a handful of suggestions that the phone boxes could be used by the community as small lending libraries.
Some of the objections were around the lack of mobile signal in the villages and the need for phone boxes in the case of network outages. Some communities lodged objections, voicing concerns that removing the phone boxes will have more of an impact on the elderly and disabled. View the feedback from the first phase of this consultation.