Regulator reckons the UK's number is up - yet again

Back in 2000, about the time  the dreaded but non-existent Millennium Bug was found to be no more than hot-air, hype and scaremongering, Ofcom came up with something more to concern the long-suffering Brits by informing an incredulous population that the country was running out of telephone numbers - again - and so introduced a series of new "wide-area" codes, that, it promised, would be sufficient to meet demand for generations to come.

It seems though that the apparatchiks at Ofcom can't count properly and, in reality, are incapable of looking forward more than about eight or nine years.

So now, less than a decade after the Big Number change of 2000 - an expensive exercise that was supposed to provide the country with sufficient numbers into perpetuity - it seems telephone numbers are once again getting to be in short supply and that more new dialing codes might have to be introduced.

This time round, rather than calling the new numbers "wide area" codes (the 02 and 03 prefixes that were nailed on to all the UK's landline numbers a couple of years ago) we are to have the delights of "overlay codes".

This, basically is yet another set of digits that will, according to Ofcom, "operate alongside existing codes" in many parts of the country. In other words, we'll have to punch in even more numbers when we make a phone call.

What's more, any such new regime would break the long-established link between a phone number and its area code. At the moment we all know that, for example, if we dial the 020 7 prefix the number we are trying to reach is in inner London, 020 8, it's in outer London, 0121 you are calling Birmingham, 0151, Liverpool, 0161, Manchester, 0141, Glasgow, 0131, Edinburgh and so on.