Far more telephone boxes are unusable because the cash safes are full than because they have been vandalised, and British Telecommunications Plc now puts the blame for its particulary poor December-January public call box survey results on staffing shortages over the Christmas period. The target is for 90% of phone boxes to be working by March 31, but the most recent report shows that Telecom’s record is actually getting worse: just 72% were in working order, compared with 75.8% in the first survey and 77.2% in the second.
