Staff Reporter

Their jobs will be outsourced in future as part of a three-year campaign to make the company more efficient.

The redundancies make up more than two per cent of Vodafones total UK workforce of 9150.

The cuts were ordered by Vodafone UK CEO Bill Morrow who has been examining the business top to bottom in the six months he has been in the job.

A Vodafone spokesperson said:

We are operating in a very competitive market in the UK shaped by external factors such as regulation. It means we have to be very cost-conscious. We discovered we have duplication.

The spokesperson added: The staff are likely to leave the business by December. We will outsource work that is not core to the site or which Vodafone employees are not best at.

Staff have been offered the statutory redundancy package and assistance from on-site careers advisers.

The Nokia shipment has never been recovered.

Lee Hadley 37 was the front man for a gang that organised the theft of a shipment of Nokias when they arrived at the airport aboard a flight from Madrid on October 3 2001.

Hadley of Cranford Close Stanwell collected the consignment using forged paperwork and identity documentation his five-day trial learned in July.

He was found guilty of obtaining the property by deception.

Hadley was not seen by police for some months and two earlier trials were aborted for various legal reasons.

Jailing him Judge Sam Katkhuda told him:

There is no doubt other people were involved and have not been caught. The stolen goods have never been recovered.

The consignment of mobile phones had been transferred from Madrid to Heathrow and that shipment was to be collected by Interken. But those goods were collected before the driver could get to United Airways to collect them. He continued: The person who collected them used notes and identity card. Nine skips of electrical goods worth 280000 were stolen and never recovered. That person was you.

This is made a little more serious by the fact that it was something that was obviously carefully planned. It was well-organised and it was well carried out the judge said.

The result is a tremendous loss to the firm that was expecting to receive these goods. You must understand that it is inevitable that for this sort of offence there must be a custodial sentence he concluded.

Earlier defence counsel Don Rogers said that Hadleys family had been devastated by what happened. He is not a career criminal with only two previous convictions.

Caudwell Group chairman John Caudwell last week announced a new 5 million Phones 4U training academy.

The academy will be located on purpose-built premises in the Midlands and provide existing and new staff with customer and sales training. Caudwell also said at a Phones 4U staff conference in Coventry that he would make 500000 available to staff in customer service incentives.

Caudwell has recruited Bill Tolmie former head of training at Singlepoint to head up the new academy.

At the time of going to press final details had still not been revealed.

Phones 4U managing director Peter Green said: Its still a very new concept. Obviously the major relationship with the customer is had by the staff inside the stores. The aim of the academy is to continue to develop and enhance the people we have in the business and their ability to do a great job and realise their full potential.

The announcement comes on the back of Phones 4Us new 10 million advertising campaign created by 118 118 agency WCRS.

It features a fast-talking idiosyncratic American called Jack Marshall who demonstrates the problems people have when buying a mobile phone. The ad campaign comes after a 12-month customer service drive by the company. Phones 4U claims it will have recruited 500 new staff by Christmas and put 3500 others through training.

Caudwell said:

This campaign marks the start of efforts to cement significant recent improvements and build on them.

The independent dealership beat off stiff competition including companies such as John Lewis and David Lloyd Leisure.

The BlackBerry 7100v which has been designed in conjunction with Research in Motion will hit channels on October 1. Pricing will be similar to a voice-only phone with only one monthly access charge. Without voice it will cost 82.50 and have a monthly e-mail charge of 15.74 subject to a fair use policy of 6MB. On BlackBerry Anytime 100 it costs 82.50 with a monthly e-mail charge of 12.77 and a monthly voice charge of 18.72 (with 100 inclusive minutes).

The accusation was made by Tony Lloyd-Weston managing director of service provider OpenAir which has demanded 3.8 million compensation from O2.

An O2 spokesman said it appeared OpenAir was deliberately drumming up publicity to put pressure on the network to settle.

He said O2 wanted to sort the problem out through mediation but that OpenAir refused to co-operate.

The spokesman said:

This is a long-running dispute being prepared for trial so it would be inappropriate for us to comment on the details.

But O2 is seeking 1.5 million for wholesale airtime bought by OpenAir who do not deny this money is owed. We are still waiting for OpenAir to validate its claims.

OpenAirs dispute with O2 has been going on for two years.

It escalated when O2 cancelled its contract with OpenAir in February and billing problems came to light. These involved unused minutes not rolling over to the next month and other call anomalies. OpenAir started legal action against O2 in March.

OpenAir claims it has an e-mail from O2 account managers admitting to the billing problem

We employed two auditors to analyse O2s core detail records said Lloyd-Weston.

The results showed attempts by O2 to manually intervene with the records at network level. O2 said it had rectified the problem and it seemed as if it had. But analysis showed manual intervention into the way the information was managed.

We have met with O2 but it now refuses to discuss the matter. This is why we are taking it to court.

O2 has threatened a high court injunction to stop us presenting this information. It is David and Goliath and we know who won that fight.

Lloyd-Weston said that some OpenAir customers refused to pay their bills because of the alleged inaccuracy.

He also claimed the discrepencies meant that the value of the OpenAir customer base was under-estimated when it was sold to Carphone Warehouses Opal Telecom division in February.

But O2 rejected the claims. UK sales director Mark Stansfeld said:

The allegation that 25 per cent of our bills were overcharged is inaccurate. We are regulated and audited and we operate within proscribed standards.

O2 head of independent channels Ian Driver explained:

To show how good our billing is we recently transferred some customers to a new system. Some of them were billed twice.

We discovered this and stopped the bills going out. We sent accurate bills and gave customers an extra month to pay. In other words when we do make mistakes we rectify them.

But OpenAir claims O2s over-billing continues. The company says it will seek 3.8 million in compensation for damage to its business if it cannot resolve the billing crisis soon.

OpenAir was due last week to take its findings about O2s customer phone call records to telecom regulator Ofcom.

For 10 a month customers can download as many video clips as they want from any of 3s sports comedy showbusiness movies news weather and horoscopes services as well as renting games.

Customers who sign up to the networks new Talk and Text plans will be offered the Video Value add-on at a promotional price of 5 a month.

O2 will host the text online and WAP messaging vote and will be providing content including True Tones music downloads ringtones and wallpapers of the icons giving readers the opportunity to purchase them via O2 Active – O2s colour multi-media entertainment and information service. l O2 has just supplied top glam-metal act The Darkness with BlackBerry 7230 handhelds for use when they are on tour.

The SF65 also comes with picture editing software.

Other features include numerous gaming options and 64-chord polyphonic ringtones as well as 18MB of internal memory.

TTG Group financial director Julian Synett said:

The numbers are not indicative of the businesss real value. What is important is what has happened since April and the successful placing and the formal launch of the mobile distribution business in The Netherlands.

Its subsidiary distribution arm TTG Netherlands which is modelled on its Anglia business in the UK has announced a distribution deal with Dutch operator Telfort. The Telfort deal follows agreements with KPN Mobile and Vodafone.