Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

The noble Baroness points out the reason why we need the new system. Airwave is expensive and out of date, and will start to become obsolete towards the end of this decade. It uses old technology and has only voice and slow text-based data services so, yes, that is entirely the aim of the new system.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, this network programme is much needed and has to be the right solution. As I understand it, one of the benefits of the new programme will be that the emergency services can send out text messages. Those were very useful during Covid and would perhaps have been useful yesterday, during the heatwave. Can my noble friend outline which services will have access to the text-messaging programme and what kind of use cases are envisaged?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I totally agree with my noble friend. It would have been very useful yesterday and it should be available across all emergency services networks: fire and ambulance, and in the Underground as well.