MPs Warn Landline Switchover Could Leave Remote Communities Unable to Call for Help in Emergencies

In a Commons exchange with security minister Dan Jarvis, MPs from some of the most far-flung parts of the UK put a blunt question to the government: what happens to a person living alone, in a storm, when the phone line goes dead?

The backdrop is a deadline. Landline operators aim to finish moving customers off the traditional copper-wire network and onto an internet-based one by the end of January next year. The government and the operators say the digital system will be more reliable. The government's own reasoning is that the old analogue network is becoming increasingly unreliable.

The MPs' concern rests on one difference between the two systems. The copper network does not depend on mains electricity, so it keeps working through a power cut. Digital services do depend on it. When the power fails, the line can fail with it.

Torcuil Crichton, the Labour MP for the Western Isles constituency of Na h-Eileanan an Iar, said resilience is built into island life, but that the move from analogue to digital has created major connectivity problems. When the power goes out, he said, people lose the phone and the internet, and often have no mobile signal either. He argued that mobile providers do not have the means to keep their signals going through storms.

Retail service providers have been handing back-up battery packs to vulnerable customers. These can keep a landline phone running for an hour or more. Crichton called that "simply not adequate". He urged Jarvis to press telecoms firms to "up their digital game" to protect places on the edge, where people are isolated from their neighbours, the ambulance is an hour away and the storm is 70 miles an hour.

Similar worries came from the West Country and the Lake District. Markus Campbell-Savours, Labour MP for Penrith and Solway, asked the minister to picture an elderly constituent living alone in an isolated Lake District valley where copper lines have been replaced by fibre. A storm cuts power to the router in the night, he said, and by morning the modest battery has run down and the mobile mast has failed too. He asked whether Jarvis shared his concern that such a person would have no way to raise an alarm, and whether a new technological solution is needed to protect the elderly.

Conservative MP Julian Lewis raised a different scenario: a cyber attack or other emergency taking down digital phone services, with no back-up system in place. He told Jarvis the copper network "could have given us useful levels of resilience" in such a case. Jarvis, who leads the government's Be Ready campaign, which encourages people to stock supplies for emergencies, said he would look very closely at that point.

Jarvis also told West Country MPs their concerns would be addressed at a government resilience summit due in Cornwall next month, and promised to raise the issues about telecoms firms with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. He described telephone networks as a vital part of critical national infrastructure that supports essential services and keeps people connected when they need it most.

Government guidance under the Be Ready campaign tells people who have not yet moved to a modern digital network to contact their landline provider. Vulnerable customers, such as telecare users, are entitled to a free back-up battery unit from their communication provider. No casualties have been reported; the warning concerns what could happen once the January deadline passes. The Cornwall summit and the minister's talks with the culture department are the next points to watch.