A PUBLIC payphone's days are numbered after British Telecom bosses decided to press ahead with plans to do away it.
Payphones in Firgrove Road, Station Road/Windermere Road and Heathcote Road/Sunbury Close would also be removed under BT's proposals.
Now after a 42-day consultation period with local residents and district, town and parish councils, BT has decided to take away the payphone in Lindford, after no one objected to its removal. The company will undertake further consultation on the three in Bordon and Whitehill after residents and councils objected to their removal.
As previously reported by The Herald, the proposals are part of a UK-wide comprehensive review of payphones which has revealed that the number of calls made from BT payphones has almost halved in the last three years.
BT has blamed the drop in the use of the facilities on the increasing reliance on mobile phones, claiming that 85 per cent of people now own one and 99 per cent now have a phone at home.
In a letter sent to Whitehill Town Council, BT outlined its plans. "In Great Britain, of the 75,000 BT phone boxes on the street, only 29,000 are profitable, with 19,000 just breaking even and 27,000 being unprofitable.
"Despite these commercial pressures, BT is very conscious of its social obligations and has pledged its commitment to providing payphone service throughout the UK, particularly for those people that are dependant on payphones for telephone service."
The company assured residents that although it planned to cut off three of Bordon's 10 public payphones, together with the one in Lindford, it would be keeping one unnamed loss-making payphone in the area.
Speaking after the decision to take away the Lindford payphone, parish council chairman Ian Skelton Smith told The Herald that the council did regret the loss of the phone box, but did not feel obliged to oppose it as residents had not objected.
He said: "We discussed the proposal at a council meeting. Councillors were notified in advance about it and the item was displayed on the agenda on village notice boards in the normal way. However, we received no representations about it from residents, and so we did not feel that we could express an objection.
"BT pointed out that there is reduced demand for payphones today because so many people have mobile phones, and I can see the commercial sense in their position. However, it is a great pity for those of us who do not have mobile phones. They assured us that the box at Elmfield Court, which is in a more prominent location and more heavily used, would be retained. I would object to any proposal to remove this one."
Lindford district councillor Yvonne Parker-Smith said when East Hampshire District Council's north east area community committee had discussed the plans fellow councillor Anna James (Liphook) expressed concern that if proposals for 207 homes at the bottom of Chase Road were approved there could be an increased demand for the use of the payphone.
But Mrs Parker-Smith conceded that although this maybe the case, BT had to make its decision on the current use of the payphone, and not what it might be in the future.
BT spokesman Jason Mann told The Herald that as there had been no objections to the removal of the payphone in the village, it would be taken away within eight weeks.
But he said a decision on the future of the three payphones in Bordon and Whitehill, for which there had been objections, had yet to be made.
"I can confirm that we have received objections on those (in Bordon and Whitehill) so we now need to look into those properly and carry out further consultation with those objectors," he said.
"It is going to take a little while to make that decision. We are not talking about weeks, we are probably not even talking about months. It is difficult to put a timescale on it. What I can say is a decision is not going to be arrived at quickly. It is an important issue and we need to look into it properly."
Speaking after the decision to carry out further consultation on the phones in Bordon and Whitehill, Michael Watkinson, district and town councillor for Whitehill, expressed concern that taking the payphones away would leave vulnerable members of the community without a lifeline in an emergency.
"I think they need to be there on behalf of the community in general so that people have access in an emergency to a telephone," he said.
"If you are in a bit of a panic, having something there that you know you can work is of particular benefit to people, especially the elderly who on the whole are not as aware of new technology, such as mobile telephones as the young are.
"I don't want to see these particular phones going. Personally I think we should always have a back up. As the saying goes 'don't throw out the baby with the bath water'. We don't know the problems which could come about if they were not there."