Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Police and Crime Commissioner Rupert Matthews has written joint letters to the Government and BT voicing serious concern at recent technical faults to the 999 service.

The Commissioner was one of several PCCs across the country to write a joint letter to Chris Philp, Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire, following last weekend's outage which prevented people from using the 999 service across the country for a period of up to 90 mins.

During the incident, BT switched to a back-up system as the 999 service was restored, with people then able to call 999 as usual.

The PCCs asked for assurances on the systems in place to hold BT to account for delivering the emergency service, which is part of the country's critical national infrastructure. They also appealed for the incident to be taken into account when analysing 999 performance data from force to force.

In a separate letter to Ed Stainton, Director of Major Government at BT Enterprise, the PCCs asked for an explanation of the failings that took place which led to the outage and the mitigating action taken to prevent further disruption in the future.

Mr Matthews said: "The public must have confidence that when they need help urgently, it will be available. Incidents such as this are, thankfully, rare, but if they reoccur may undermine that trust.

"The outage and its impact on those callers who couldn't get through is an issue of serious concern and it will take some time to establish exactly how this affected what were potentially life-threatening emergencies. We have asked for a full explanation as to what led to this incident and how the situation was managed as part of our responsibilities to protect the public and serve all victims of crime.

"It is critical that appropriate steps are taken now to prevent this from happening again in the future. Alongside my colleagues across the country, I would like assurances from the Government and BT that no effort is being spared to tighten procedures to reduce any future risks to the service."

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