Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 13 July 2020 to Question 71074, on Emergency Services Network: Strathconon, what steps her Department has taken to look at cases where there may be a particular case for early activation due to community need, as well as potential funding sources to enable that.
We expect the contract for connecting all 292 EAS masts to the network to be awarded in Autumn 2021. Following the award of this contract the work to deliver the links can take several months before connecting the mast to the network and, separately, activating the mast. Although we cannot give firm dates for the final activation of masts at this stage, we expect this to commence in 2022 and complete towards the end 2024. Unfortunately we are unable to accelerate this.