Incoming chairman Iain Vallance said on Friday that British Telecom was not to blame for its recent problems. Laying the blame firmly at the feet of successive governments, Mr Vallance clamed that customers were now seeing the effects of years of under-investment prior to privatisation. Privatisation, he said, has been largely benign, and has lead to BT becoming more, not less, accountable. But, he admitted, there had been growing pains, lessons that other governments and PTTs working towards privatisation would do well to heed. According to Mr Vallance, there was no contradiction between making a profit and offering services to customers. But, he acknowledged, staff morale had suffered since privatisation. He called on the unions to stop looking backwards and to take an interest in the future. They needed, he said, to understand the implications of new techno-logy and its effects on working practices and the BT organisation as a whole. I really do believe the staff are very good – and they are retrainable. Despite the complaints about the telephone service, Mr Vallance offered little prospect of radical improvements. BT will instead continue on what he described as its steady as you go policy. He said that BT’s main priority in the months ahead would be to improve its basic services such as pay-phones and directory enquiries. But, he said this did not require any major changes of policy. Instead, BT would continue to concentrate on its bread and butter tasks including modernising the UK network and developing the business so that the company became a major player in the IT world, not just in telecommunications. Mr Vallance said that this did not mean moving into any thing other than modest manufacturing and he ruled out major acquisitions. He and his team are, however, contemplating small acquisitions of up to UKP250m. But, he said, there was already major growth within BT without acquisitions. A great deal of work had gone into both financial services and public data networks and they were starting to bear results. BT had also been in talks with British Airways with a view to becoming involved in the Galileo shared airline reservation network. Summing up the future, Mr Vallance stated that Telecom planned to be the most efficient player in the world – in our best bits we are, and will remain, world class.
