Lord Paddick
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Emergency Services Network
Lord Paddick Excerpts(4 years, 4 months ago)
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The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)
I call Lord Desai. No? We will move on. I call the noble Lord, Lord Paddick.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, this new emergency service network will operate on old 4G technology, and current estimates are that it will cost £33,000 per user. We learned from the King’s Cross fire and the 7/7 terrorist attacks the importance of this network working on the London Underground but, to date, it does not—even though my own iPhone does. How and when will this be resolved?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
The noble Lord is absolutely right to point to the importance of emergency networks in the London Underground. In fact, that work and that testing has begun with TfL— I visited one of its sites in Canada Water—but it has been delayed because of Covid-19, for very obvious practical reasons. I can assure the noble Lord on this. The testing is absolutely imperative, so that the technology that we have works in emergency situations such as those he referred to.