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on securing this debate. He focused most of his remarks on 0845 numbers, but they are not the only numbers the Department uses. As I explain, I will give a more balanced picture of the telephone situation than the one he gave in what I thought was a selective presentation of the information.

The Department has set out clear principles for the provision of telephone services. Indeed, they were set out when the right hon. Gentleman was a member of the previous Government in 2008. There are four clear principles. First, calls to claim benefits should be free to the customer. Secondly, there should be a consistent approach across the Department, both for clarity and equity. Thirdly, the approach should make sense from the customer’s point of view, rather than being driven by product lines or organisational structure. Fourthly, it must be sustainable in terms of future business models and changes in the telephony market.

To enact those principles, calls to claim benefit are free and utilise 0800 numbers. The right hon. Gentleman said that crisis loan calls were not free, but they are. Other calls that typically take less time to resolve are made to 0845 numbers. Their use means that the customer is charged the same amount regardless of their geographical location or that of the DWP office they are calling. The exact cost will vary depending on the caller’s phone number and the service provider. I will give more detail on that later.

The Department provides customers with a facility to make a free telephone call to claim the state pension, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, employment and support allowance, crisis loans and other emergency payments. These calls are free of charge from all major landline providers. The right hon. Gentleman talked about the Ofcom changes making it free to call these numbers from a mobile. The Department has already made that change. As a result, eight of the UK’s largest mobile phone operators—O2, Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Hutchison 3G, Tesco Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Cable and Wireless—allow their customers to make those calls for free already.

The Department uses 0800 and 0845 numbers, rather than the geographical 01 and 02 numbers, to enable the operation of a virtual telephony network across the UK. This network has been in place for working-age benefits and crisis loans since 2008, and allows callers to be directed to the next available adviser with the appropriate skills to answer a customer’s inquiry. For example, someone ringing from their home in Rotherham or Barnsley to make a claim for jobseeker’s allowance might be connected to an adviser in Dundee, Derby or Poole. They will be directed to the first adviser available, rather than left hanging on the telephone waiting for the call to be answered in their local benefit or contact centre. Furthermore, should that person wish to make an inquiry about their benefits later on, that call would be answered by the first available adviser in a centre, wherever that centre might be, rather than left waiting for someone in their local centre to answer.

The use of these numbers gives the Department the flexibility to manage the peaks and troughs of the different types of inquiries it receives nationally. Calls can be routed to additional centres, as and when volumes require, and advisers are trained to handle more than one type of inquiry. This method of handling customer calls has proved to be much more efficient than the