THE ludicrously profitable BT Group, together with its currently even more loaded subsidiary Openreach, is behaving quite disgracefully by claiming a need for spending constraint as a reason for trying to push through its new, and potentially life-endangering, internet-based telephones system.

In June, this column described how the bullheaded plan by the telecoms behemoth to totally scrap landline phones by 2025 would leave untold numbers of isolated communities at dire risk of being unable to get help in an emergency. The danger was illustrated when. last winter, a house in rural Scotland burnt down after its owner, a pensioner, had his dependable landline phone replaced by a wireless phone. The new devices are linked to broadband and need mains electricity to work. The fire broke out during a power-cut, and the area is without a mobile-phone signal. Landlines work during power-cuts but, without his, the pensioner couldn’t call the fire brigade.

The prospect of a similar nightmare hovers over isolated parts of Wales, which typically have little or no mobile signals and are often without power. Mountainous Cwmystwyth, 16 miles from Aberystwyth, is one such place. Here, BT began to impose its dratted new Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) system, clearly without employing an ounce of imagination over its repercussions for this frequently storm-battered location, which has no mobile signal and knows all about blackouts. Showing total mindlessness, the new devices were given out with the incredible warning: “You will not be able to call 999 (or any other numbers) from this phone if there is a cut in the electricity supply or if there are broadband problems.

“So make sure you have another way of calling for help in an emergency.”

Faced with growing complaints, BT has temporarily paused its VOIP roll-out. But it may just as well admit the obvious: it’s set on trashing the secure and dependable analogue network, and replacing it with a system useless whenever there are power-cuts, or broadband disconnections for a variety of other reasons.

It claims the copper lines used in landlines will soon become too expensive to maintain. In the case of BT Group plc, this is a complete nonsense. In the last financial year, they reported a pre-tax profit of £2bn and, in the first six months of last year alone, Openreach made £1bn. The new phones are simply about making even more money.

The media and politicians need to kick up more of a racket about VOIP. BBC Wales, for example, is being puny. The corporation’s charter says its journalism “should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other…news providers.” But a recent online report on the Cwmystwyth fiasco contains zero analysis, and the somewhat forelock-tugging: “BT emphasizes that we must move to a digital system and away from the old copper lines which are reaching the end of their life.” Nowhere does the BBC charter call for mild-mannered deference.

LIZ Truss promises help with soaring power bills, and Keir Starmer asks where the money will come from if she cuts taxes. It’s at this point the PM probably needs reminding of an initiative launched in July by the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, when he was business and energy secretary.

Echoing demands by this column for months past, he announced a move to bring about changes to the wholesale electricity market that would “stop volatile gas prices setting the price of electricity produced by much cheaper renewables”.

Sadly, the Kwarteng strategy appears to have ground to a halt, at potentially crippling cost to poorer people, including thousands living in electric-only homes in rural Wales.

If the UK Government is serious about providing lasting, as opposed to stop-gap, help for householders, it will urgently accelerate a reform that would cut hundreds from electricity bills.

FOLLOWING my account a fortnight ago of the suspected deaths of five merlin chicks after their nest in a mid Wales valley was disturbed by bird-ringers, a retired farmer in south Ceredigion tells me: “Sad to say, ringing is not only a problem for merlin chicks. We have an owl who has two to three chicks each year, only to have them die after a visit from the ‘do-gooder’ ringing brigade.

“The owls are healthy and coming along nicely until they are ringed. Within a few days of ringing, we find them dead below the nest, with the adult owl left mourning their death.”

She adds: “No matter how much we try to hide their location for their safety, they are found by the so-called conservation experts, who kill them. The red kite only survived in mid Wales through the solitude of nesting places being left undisturbed by man. Surely lessons should be learned by the powers-that-be to leave them alone.”

Another email comes from the birdwatcher who first spotted the merlins’ nest beneath a clump of dead heather. Referring to my piece, he writes: “I'm afraid to say this is the sort of ‘journalism’ which gives journalists a bad name.” You get a message like that, and you know for sure you can’t be doing that bad a job.