Aerials: High Peak

(asked on 26th April 2018) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many mobile phone masts are being built under the Emergency Services Network in High Peak.


Answered by
Nick Hurd Portrait
Nick Hurd
This question was answered on 1st May 2018

I can confirm there will be 3 new EE sites and 3 planned Extended Area Service (EAS) sites located in the constituency of High Peak as part of the Emergency Services Network (ESN).

All new EE sites are being built and delivered to agreed Home Office timeframes and where possible will go live earlier to support commercial coverage. Two of the three EE sites in High Peak have planning permission. Commercial services are not currently provided from these masts as they have not yet been activated, but it is EE’s intention to do so when the sites are live.

In respect of EAS sites I can confirm that there are currently 3 sites proposed in High Peak, two of these are located at Snake Pass, and the other at Howden Reservoir. This may reduce to 2 pending planning authority engagement on site locations as 1 nominal location (Howden Reservoir) is close to the High Peak Constituency boundary and may move outside. These sites are in the early stages of Acquisition & Design and therefore none have Heads Of Terms or planning permission approved and therefore have not progressed into build thus far.

To provide the necessary coverage for the emergency services, EE is building over 500 new sites. Up to 291 of these new sites will transfer to the Home Office at contract end. EE is paid a fixed fee for the ESN service and as such there is no site-by-site subsidy for these 291 sites. EE is making available early and extensive details of all shareable new sites, including locations, to other mobile network operators as soon as they have planning permission and terms have been agreed with the landlord. EE has provided details of 350 sites to date.

Separately the Home Office, through the EAS project, are delivering circa 292 individual sites. I would also like to reassure you that the Home Office has been proactive in seeking to build masts that support multi-operator use where practicable. The Home Office provided an initial generic cost for EAS site build as part of the programme full business case however, given we are at the early stages of initial build cost assessments for EAS sites that are now working their way towards build instruction, we have no approved costs at this time and therefore no data to provide actuals. The same applies to the sites in early acquisition and design phase for the specific High Peak Area detailed

Finally I thought it helpful to remind you that ESN is designed to, first and foremost, deliver a ‘blue-light’ communications service.

Reticulating Splines