A COUNCILLOR has called on BT to clean its "filthy" phone boxes around Bournemouth.

Last week town centre councillor David Smith called for councils to be granted more powers to stop new phone boxes being installed after a recent national surge in applications by small telecommunications firms, described by the Local Government Association as "staggering".

But he has also taken aim at the existing booths in the town centre area.

A survey of 37 town centre call boxes carried out by local business representatives found that 10 were out of order and 25 required cleaning.

"They are filthy and unloved and covered in graffiti," said Cllr Smith.

"They are proxy advertising billboards for BT.

"If BT insist on having telephone boxes on our streets it is high time they looked after them.

"You rarely see any of them used."

Also, he said, the booths were used by drug dealers and users.

But the firm said its booths are used "quite regularly" and it intends to retain almost all of them. One of the 37, identified in the survey as in need of cleaning and containing drugs paraphernalia, was removed last week.

A spokesman for BT said: "Use of payphones has declined by more than 90 per cent in the last decade, but BT remains committed to providing a public payphone service where it is still needed.

"In fact, we removed one of these payphones last week, but have no plans at present to remove any other town centre kiosks, which generally speaking are used quite regularly and so are still providing an important service to the public.

"Naturally, we keep all our payphones under review and where evidence indicates that a kiosk is no longer needed we seek to remove it.

"If someone tells us about a defect with one of our payphones then an engineer will always visit - and each time an engineer visits a kiosk he or she will ensure it’s left clean and tidy."

BT said it would be checking all the identified payphones to ensure they were up to scratch.

"On the matter of advertising, it means we can continue to provide non-profitable boxes," the spokesman added.