Government departments are to face restrictions on the use of premium-rate phone lines that have been condemned by campaigners as "wicked".

Under new guidelines issued by the Cabinet Office, departments and public bodies will have to write a letter of explanation to the civil society minister, Nick Hurd, if they use "inappropriate" premium-rate lines.

The announcement comes after a hard-hitting report by the Commons public accounts committee last month found 63% of calls to central government were to higher-rate telephone numbers, at a cost of £56m, in 2012-13. The Cabinet Office admitted to the committee that it had "played no role in monitoring or co-ordinating government telephone lines" since it last issued guidance in 2010.

The committee found the higher-rate lines have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable groups after discovering that 59 out of 120 such numbers are used by departments for lower-income groups. The higher-rate lines include a Victim Support helpline, the Bereavement Service helpline plus and 34 other lines run by the Department for Work and Pensions, and the inquiries and complaints lines of the Student Loans Company.

In the guidance, the Cabinet Office said: "It is inappropriate for callers to pay substantial charges for accessing core public services, particularly for vulnerable and low-income groups … The cross-departmental group will monitor implementation of these key principles and publish a status report each year. Departments will be asked to provide or publish timely and comparable information on number prefixes, and we will set out more detail on this before spring 2014."

The Cabinet Office said the guidance would help ensure "greater fairness and certainty for callers."

Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the public accounts committee, welcomed the announcement: "This is good news for citizens and it is good that the government has listened to reason and relented. It was always wrong for any government department to levy these charges to often the most vulnerable in our community."

David Hickson of the Fair Telecoms Campaign said: "This is what we have been pressing for for a very long time … In some cases people who are simply inquiring about their pension or benefits or even reporting a problem about a business to the Citizens Advice consumer helpline, which used to be called Consumer Direct, can cost up to 41p a minute. It was an outrageous situation that the government was using these premium lines, it was wicked. But we have won – everyone understands that it is wrong now and they are doing something to change it."

The Cabinet Office said it was seeking to introduce a "digital by default" approach in which most government communications with the public were web-based. But it acknowledged that low-income groups would need to use phone lines and need some protection from high-cost lines.