Hang up on Britain’s blight boxes

We’ve all seen them. Unused, unloved, ugly phone boxes squatting on the pavement, windows smeared with grime, plastered in posters, often reeking of urine. Once symbols of modern Britain, today’s phone boxes have become magnets for graffiti, litter, and anti-social behaviour. So why have they stuck around?

In the age of the iPhone, public calls from phone boxes have collapsed by 99.5% since 2002. Yet there are still around 15,800 phone boxes scattered across the UK, of which only 6,000 are the iconic red phone boxes we have come to love. The reason why, unsurprisingly, traces back to outdated regulations.

BT’s status as the designated Universal Service Provider means it must maintain a network of public telephones and it may only remove a phone box without consultation if there are other phone boxes within 400 metres. There are good reasons for that. Around 150,000 emergency calls were made from phone boxes in 2019-20, and they remain valuable in remote areas with poor mobile coverage or during emergencies. Nobody sensible is arguing for the removal of every last box. The real problem is that regulations designed to protect a useful public service are now preserving decrepit infrastructure.

When it comes to a phone box’s function, there is more to it than initially appears. Some of these boxes occupy some of the busiest and most valuable pieces of pavement in Britain. In locations where planning permission for a standalone advertising hoarding would be fiercely resisted, these telephone boxes enjoy legal protections. Many of these booths now provide free Wi-Fi, harvesting data that can be used for targeted advertising while displaying adverts to thousands of pedestrians every day.

The commercial value now far exceeds the public value of the phones themselves. Redundant booths remain rooted to some of Britain’s busiest pavements, long after they have ceased to serve any meaningful purpose.

Millions of pounds and hours of effort can be spent transforming a street for the better, laying new, wider paving, planting trees, and adding benches, only for a semi-abandoned phone box to remain stubbornly in the middle of it all because no one can make it disappear. Indeed, when well maintained, classic red telephone boxes are rightfully viewed as enriching the street, rather than detracting from it. The problem is not phone boxes themselves. It is the lack of any incentive either to maintain them properly or remove them when they have become redundant.

While some booths become Wi-Fi hubs and pseudo billboards or are given a new lease of life as a library, museum, or even defibrillator station, many booths have become dumping grounds for rubbish and magnets for anti-social behaviour. These are blight boxes and local authorities often believe they have remarkably few powers to force their removal. Negotiations with operators can reportedly end with demands of £30,000 to £50,000 to remove a single booth. Faced with those sums, councils give up trying and surrender their responsibility.

Necessary changes to national regulations will take time to change, but for a government so focused on regeneration and restoring pride in place, these remedial steps, as outlined in our recent report, are well worth doing. This could be as simple as ensuring, through legislation, that communication equipment is kept in a good state of repair under risk of fine.

In the meantime, we needn’t wait for Whitehall to persuade local councils that people do care what their streets look like and that getting rid of these eyesores can have an outsized positive impact.

That’s why we have launched Booth-Buster, a simple app that allows anyone to report neglected or redundant phone boxes in their neighbourhood. We are encouraging people across the country to photograph a booth and record its location. From there, the app does all the heavy lifting, detecting the type of booth you have snapped and what regulations are therefore involved, and then offering to send the local council an email asking them to do something about it.

The principle is simple. We can already report potholes, fly-tipping, and graffiti because the public realm belongs to all of us. Redundant phone boxes should be no different. The first step is making visible what everyone has had to learn to ignore.

We walk past these booths every day without questioning why they persist, or why they are allowed to look so awful. Yet most have outlived the purpose for which they were installed decades ago. These semi-abandoned booths survive because outdated rules have allowed their commercial value to rule rather than incentivising caring for them or for the streets on which they stand.

Britain’s streets deserve better. Reclaiming them can start with something as simple as taking a photograph.

After all, it’s time these phone boxes did what they were always meant to do: call on someone who might actually solve the problem.