According to a mate who worked for BT back when it was part of the GPO, the delays were down to (IIRC) three different sections of technical staff being involved in activating a line - one at the exchange, one who dealt with the (green) street junction box, and one who actually installed the phone in your house/office.
i, coincidentally, happen to know an answer to the question you are answering here VP. As a 'one man installer' it was my responsibility to hoist and connect a 'dropwire' from the 'distribution pole' top to the subscribers home/office. Once that was complete, the 'instrument' (ie telephone) was fitted according to the subscribers desires, often in the hallway or window bottom, but basically anywhere the sub' wanted it fitting. Sometimes this would involve many yards of internal cabling, at no additional cost for the installation, which was a fixed price of about £45 if memory serves. Once the house install was complete it was also my task to attend the "green street junction box" (official description 'cabinet') to interconnect the distribution side of the underground cabling to the exchange side of the underground cabling to provide a dial tone service to the subscriber. It was also often my task to attend to the 'main distribution frame' (MDF) connection at the appropriate telephone exchange, completing the installation by fitting a pair of fuses on the 'D' side of the MDF.
It is possible that other telephone areas operated a slightly different regime, with the exchange work being the responsibility of dedicated staff, but the concept of a 'one man installer' was actually national in the UK, as was the pricing structure.
When we owned the telephone system (under the umbrella of the GPO) it was a system that sought to present a human face, and its necessary electronic complexity involved significant planning,(ie, in the social democratic sense), and i well remember being involved in the cabling of entire council estates (prior to them being built), because the ethos of the public service aspect of the telephone network had understood and planned for a telephone to be fitted into every single tenancy. It was dispiriting to see that once those estates had reached completion, much of that planning and investment went to (short term) waste - mainly because the council tenant demographic in the 1970s often could not afford the install costs of a telephone, or the rent, which wasnt insignificant.
All those decades of public investment for public purposes was ultimately stolen from the public by Thatcher and her gangsters in the tory privatising frenzy of the 1980s. The rich sucked it all up, and continue to benefit from a comprehensive telecommunications network that really ought to be back in the hands of the state - but with one critical difference to the old model of the GPO days - when its renationalised, as it must be, lets have it under actual workers control, rather than suffering under the heel of batteries of lickspittle capitalists and accountants.
Surely a shit troll but it made me smile.
