A new report from think tank Create Street has suggested that the new UK government should make it easier for local authorities to remove old and “ugly” pay phone boxes, which are said to damage the look of many high streets by attracting litter, graffiti and.. other things.
The focus here is on the more modern boxes (e.g. KX100+), rather than BT’s classic red kiosks across the UK or KCOM’s cream-coloured ones in Hull – many of those are now protected. There are now roughly 20,000 remaining working payphones (aka – “Public Call Boxes” or PCB) across the UK, around 3,000 of which are in traditional red kiosks.
However, the new report suggests that more than half of the remaining boxes are likely to be “blighting” the UK’s streets, which are said to act as magnets for graffiti, littering, fly tipping, drug taking and worse. But the report claims that removing these can sometimes end up costing tens of thousands of pounds, such as when operators add a claim for lost advertising money.
According to The Guardian‘s summary (Create Street don’t seem to have posted the report on their website yet), the think tank suggests that one way to resolve this would be via a legislative change to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to make it easier to remove phone boxes. For example, changing it so that operators are only compensated for the cost to remove the box and not for any lost advertising revenue.
Nicholas Boys Smith, Founder of Create Street, said:
“Box blight is a menace hiding in plain sight, attracting litter, cluttering up our pavements and making all our streets and square a little bit uglier and less pleasant. We don’t have to put up with this and we shouldn’t. Other countries don’t. Our paper sets out practical steps that the new government can take now to make our streets and town centres better and more prosperous.”
We should point out that BT has spent the past few years decommissioning many of their old payphones, most of which were no longer being used – largely due to improvements in mobile coverage and related service affordability. Some of those have been replaced by the operator’s new smart WiFi Street Hub kiosks (mostly in cities), while others have been adopted by local authorities or registered charities under the “Adopt a Kiosk” scheme (e.g. turning them into WiFi hotspots, 4G small cells, mini libraries or storage for life-saving public defibrillators – there are about 700 of the latter).
Suffice to say that some of those old payphone boxes do more than merely act as ugly advertising holders, but certainly there will be others that people would perhaps rather see being removed. No doubt many of those reading this article today will be able to think of a few examples from their own area.
On the other hand, Ofcom does generally expect operators to retire unused boxes over time, and so most of those may still end up going extinct and without the need for new legislation. Put another way, there is probably more scope for a voluntary solution to this than complex and slow legislative change.