Andy Reed (Loughborough, Labour)
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what provision is made for deaf people to access services provided by his Department through call centres.
Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions)
Deaf people can use the typetalk service or our separate textphone numbers to access all our call centres.
Comment:
Again, what is the deal with all these parliamentary questions on how to contact various departments by telephone. Does it actually necessitate a parliamentary question for this subject? Any random person can go use Typetalk now to phone up, and really doesn't need this amount of political work! There's plenty of other things deaf organisations could be doing to occupy themselves, instead of using Andy Reed as some puppet. Or is there some bet happening re how many times Typetalk can be mentioned in Hansard?!
Ask the Readers:
Are government departments really putting the phone down on people calling through relay services? What's the purpose of these questions? Marketing? Money spin?
Source:
Hansard
They Work for You
See also:
Parliament: Deaf Telephone Access to the HM Treasury
Parliament: Contacting the Department of Transport
Parliament: Deaf Telephone Access to the Department of Health
Comments (2)
So in other words we're stuck with a monopolist relay service where we have no choice if it's not up to par quality wise. Furthermore there are no options for thoes that use BSL to have a BSL based relay because...oh wait a minute...there's no funding for it. Let's just give RNID more money instead because they run TypeTalk and so on.
RNID is so *wonderful* helping us, making sure that they have no deafies in management level (because we're deaf we're not really good enough for that sort of thing) - leave it to them to know better for our benefit.
I could go on really...
Posted by JGJones | March 30, 2008 6:21 PM
what about signvideo? isn't this a BSL based relay available in the UK....
Posted by Anonymous | June 12, 2008 9:37 AM