In the Budget there was lots of talk from Chancellor Rachel Reeves of boosting growth and improving the nation’s sluggish productivity, a long-standing issue.
The UK’s output for each worker is lower than that of the US, France and Germany. All kinds of measures, mostly involving higher taxes, have been or will be proposed.
I have a simpler solution. There would be an immediate fillip to the economy if the British picked up their phones and used them for their original purpose, which is to speak to one another.
In the flurry of texts, emails, social media posts and photographs, people – particularly young people – have forgotten why phones were invented in the first place: to make calls.
If we want to get stuff done and decided fast, we need to talk more. Not only for the economy but also for our mental health. We are in a loneliness epidemic.
It is made worse by factors such as working from home and businesses eager to cut overheads, whatever the consequences. The best solution is for people to meet in person but, failing this, the sound of a human voice would work wonders.
Most young adults would not dream of making a call or even answering one. If you call them, they view it as intrusive, borderline hostile.
A quarter of 18 to 34-year-olds never answer a phone; this even seems to cover FaceTime video calls. But even mid-lifers and baby boomers are beginning to feel it’s cool to shun speech for the various forms of text-based messaging.
A pet hate is when you do call someone, and they order you not to leave a voicemail but send them a text instead. It is so rude to expect the caller to make all the effort, and why? What is so hard about listening to a voice message? Are their eardrums so delicate they cannot withstand the assault?
An even more serious point is that businesses are equally averse to speaking to their own customers.
This is self-harm on their part: the benefits would be considerable if there was more in-person chat and less texting and direct messaging on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, X/Twitter and the rest.
These platforms appear to offer immediacy and speed of contact.
But too often they are a source of delay and displacement activity.
When did it become normal to send an email, or WhatsApp asking if it would be OK to ring someone and, if so, to make an appointment for this intrusion on their personal space? It’s hardly as if you are proposing to hammer down the front door of their house.
And having been able to secure this privilege, why should it be necessary to send a follow-up email stating everything that you have just outlined?
Maybe there should be some Treasury modelling of the hours wasted composing an email when a quick call would sort the issue in minutes.
Part of this aversion to impromptu communication is the legacy of the pandemic lockdowns.
Working from home made a call from the office seem like an invasion of privacy as social and professional contact switched to Zoom or Teams.
These systems are hugely convenient, but the set-up can lack spontaneity. Instead of passing on information, the more confident people will often perform, underlining their superiority. More junior staff may be cowed into embarrassed or resentful silence.
As for consumer complaints or enquiries, wouldn’t it be great if a company would answer the phone in a reasonable time? No chance. They want to save money by discouraging phone calls, so they try to persuade us to use the chatbot messaging route on their website or app.
Don’t they realise no one phones an insurance or banking helpline for fun? If customers have problems that can be answered by the online frequently asked questions, they will do that, and won’t ring up.
But the standard responses are generated by artificial intelligence and rarely answer a real-life question in an effective fashion. The covert aim is to make the customer give up, go away and never again have the temerity to bother them.
In an unguarded moment, one banker described customers attempting to speak to a real person as ‘abusing the phone’. Heaven forfend that the account holders, who are the reason why he receives a large salary and bonus, should expect some service.
The individual concerned may regret this remark. But it inspired me into some phone ‘abuse’ of my own.
My insurer was trying to raise the premium on my home and buildings policy by 30 per cent, believing that I would automatically assent to this well-above-inflation increase – which came without additional cover and was not prompted by a claim.
I rang the number, swerved every attempt to make me use the website and succeeded in reducing the rise to 2 per cent.
Being studiously polite helps on these occasions. Long waiting times at bank and other insurance companies can mean that customers grow irate and take this out on the employees at call centres, poorly staffed to keep costs low so that their bosses can pocket their bonuses.
By making it almost impossible talk to someone, banks, insurers and other businesses are behaving as though they are doing us a favour when they do let us speak to a human, rather than providing the service they should.
These barriers are exacerbated by the difficulty in getting through to anybody.
Instead of improving, the mobile signal seems to deteriorate: the UK’s 5G speeds rank at number 21 out of 25 European countries.
As the Financial Times observed earlier this year: ‘It is less about getting 4G or 5G phone coverage, and more whether you have any G at all.’
This urgently needs to change if we are to achieve growth in the economy, or even talk to our friends and family.
London is a global city – whose business is business. But even in parts of the West End and the City, the mobile signal can be so poor that attempting to make a call is futile. In some rural areas of the country things are as bad or worse.
The mobile phone operators cite difficulties with the installation of masts.
But they are mostly being evasive: the mergers between operators always come with pledges of more investment, but what happens is that we pay more and there is no improvement.
We urgently need better connectivity to ensure that Britain looks attractive to businesses who would like to invest here but can be stupefied at the lack of signal even in city centres.
While writing this piece, I received about 170 emails via three different systems, several WhatsApps, a voice note (creepy, in my opinion, whoever the sender) and a single call.
On that lone call, which lasted five minutes, we swapped some news, some (amazing, actually) gossip, decided a course of action over a piece of work and agreed a date for a breakfast. Effective, reassuring, rapid. It’s good to talk. Are you listening, Rachel?
