Alcoholics Anonymous Great Britain Electronic Communications
Sub-Committee
London Telephone Service
If you are new to AA or have a problem with drink,
call our Helpline 0845 769 7555 or click here
This page is for business of the Committee for Telephone and 12 Stepping Service in London. The Committee comprises representatives from each Intergroup throughout the two London Regions (North and South). Meeting bi-monthly, the Telephone and Twelve Stepping Committee deals with issues pertaining to the service overall and the organisation of weekend and evening teams of volunteers to take calls and organise contact with the suffering alcoholic, ideally locally as a personal 12th step call, to get them to a meeting.
London’s Telephone Service, housed in AA’s Southern Service Office, is the busiest in Europe, with more than 900 incoming calls weekly.
It has been organised, manned and paid for by London
members to operate from 10am-10pm, seven days a week, all year round since 1974,
when paid staff were first employed to support the service.
The size of the population it serves (10-12m) means it
deals with one in five of all calls to UK AA and necessitates a three-tier
service structure in passing the calls for help from suffering alcoholics to the
surrounding Fellowship.
Some 90 teams a month, each of five volunteers, man the five telephone lines. The Team Leaders pass more than 300 Twelfth-Step calls each month to Home Responders in 14 areas of Greater London (intergroups or combined intergroups). Including Reserves, around 300 AAs are involved in this part of the chain. They, in turn, pass the calls to any of the hundreds of AAs on the local Twelfth-Step lists. In all, at least 1,000 members are organised to support the 12-hour service.
Our guidelines have been carefully compiled over many years and are constantly monitored to ensure that our members doing service are fully aware of our system and can deal with calls of all natures as representatives of AA.
Click here to view or download a PDF of our most recently updated guidelines
Click to visit our reports and minutes page
Click to visit our Call Statistics page
As agreed by our committee on 14th August, TLOs are now asked to call in teams ONE WEEK in advance of shifts to ensure sufficient time to organise cover when necessary.
We are continuing to reduce teams to 4 in the afternoon, evening and weekend shifts.
Team Contacts
TLOs please pass your meeting TL contacts to Ben to compile our contacts list for evening and weekend teams
TLOs and Intergroup chairs, please download the Foreign Speakers flier to distribute at intergroups and meetings for the updating of our foreign language speaking lists.