18 Saturday January 1 2022 | the times
News
When Storm Arwen struck, Jenny Lee
knew she would be in for a difficult few
days. Living in a remote part of Co Dur-
ham, with her husband away for the
week, the 76-year-old was on her own
when the electricity in her area cut off.
She was without heating or hot water as
temperatures fell to -6C.
With nothing but candles and torch-
es to see with, what came as the biggest
surprise was having no signal on her
mobile phone, rendering it useless.
The storm, which hit at the end of
November, knocked out a number of
phone masts in Co Durham, Northum-
berland and Scotland.
“There was no way of communicat-
ing with anybody at all. It was really
very frightening being on my own in
the dark,” Lee, a part-time teacher who
lives in Middleton-in-Teesdale, said.
The lack of electricity had also affect-
ed her landline phone which, like eight
in ten households, is cordless and re-
quires the unit that plugs into the
phone socket to have mains power to
operate. A neighbour gave her a corded
plug-in phone, which worked because
the telephone line takes its power from
the local exchange, where back-up
power is available.
Yet within the next three years, this
50,000 properties would not be able to
make a call indoors.
Many households living in remote or
rural areas argue that reliance on
mobile phones during an emergency is
no good in places where mobile recep-
tion is patchy or when storms have
damaged masts or cut off power.
“This system will be useless when
there is no power and there will be no
way to contact the emergency ser-
vices,” Lee said. “During Storm Arwen
we had no power for four days and I sus-
pect this will happen more frequentlyas we experience increasingly extreme
weather due to climate change.”
Lee is not alone in these concerns. Up
and down the UK, people are reporting
difficulties in using mobile phones dur-
ing power cuts, and questioning what
backups will be in place once the move
is made to broadband-based calls.
Patrick Farrelly, from Saunton in
north Devon, had his line switched to
VoIP this summer. He said powercuts
were not uncommon in his area and he
was concerned about leaving his wife
on her own, because she does not have
a mobile phone and has a heart defect.
“I live in a rural area in Devon and
have had this system imposed upon me,
experiencing the failure of the system
during a power cut,” Farrelly, 72, said.
BT says it provides a battery back-up
pack that enables calls to be made and
received via a phone line for an hour in
the event of a mains power cut in a
home. This is free for homeowners in
areas with no mobile signal, or for cus-
tomers flagged as vulnerable, but oth-
erwise costs about £85.
However, Farrelly said he had asked
for a back-up battery pack from BT in
July and was yet to get one. BT said
there had been a global shortage of
units but it has begun to reissue them.
Ofcom said: “We have set clear ex-
pectations on phone companies
around the switch to digital calls. Theyshould communicate effectively with
customers and identify people who
may be at risk because they depend on
their landline. Those customers should
be offered a free solution, such as bat-
tery backup or a mobile phone that
works in the area.”
Chris Howe, customer change di-
rector at BT, EE and Plusnet, said: “We
advise our customers to have a back-up
mobile phone in their home.
“Calls from a mobile phone to 999 are
made on any available network, not just
your providers. With 99 per cent of UK
premises covered with at least 2G signal
there will be some people who will need
further support. For these customers,
who live in areas with more frequent
power cuts, we will provide a battery
back-up unit which can power a digital
voice service for over an hour.”
Peter Stephenson, from Bishop
Auckland in Co Durham, said his wife
had a heart attack when his local area
had a power cut that also disabled his
mobile service. He used his BT landline
to call emergency services.
“The operator dispatched paramed-
ics and talked me through CPR.”
His wife, Heather, suffered brain
damage during the seizure and died in
hospital, but Stephenson said that with-
out the landline support of the emer-
gency services, he would have been left
to deal with the incident on his own.How move to
digital may
signal end
of a lifeline
simple but life-saving device will no
longer be an option as analogue land-
line phones are phased out.
Landline phone calls have tradition-
ally been delivered via copper wire con-
nections over the public switched tele-
phone network (PSTN). Yet telecom
providers are moving away from ser-
vices that rely on copper wire, some of
which date back to Victorian times, to
fibre broadband technology.
BT Openreach, which manages the
UK’s phone and internet network, is re-
tiring the PSTN by December 2025.
That means home phone providers,
such as BT, Sky and Virgin Media O2,
will move customers to a digital techno-
logy known as “voice over internet pro-
tocol” (VoIP), which carries calls over a
broadband connection.
Unlike traditional landlines, such
systems are entirely reliant on mains
electricity. Ofcom, which regulates the
telecoms industry, says that in the event
of a power cut most people will be able
to rely on a mobile phone.
It says that if someone dials 999, the
mobile phone will use whichever net-
work has reception, regardless of whe-
ther the caller is with that provider, and
that 100 per cent of properties in the
UK can normally receive enough signal
to make an emergency call outside their
property.
However, it estimates that aboutTom Knowles
Technology Correspondent
Patrick and Sarah Farrelly, above, and Jenny Lee say they have no way of calling emergency services during a power cut4G coverage in the UK
14%100%All providersSource: WhichThe attorney-general has applied to the
Court of Appeal to increase the jail
sentences given to the killers of Arthur
Labinjo-Hughes.
Arthur, six, died of a brain injury after
being attacked by his father’s partner,
Emma Tustin, 32, while alone at home
with her in Solihull, West Midlands, in
June 2020.
Tustin, described in court as “manip-
ulative” and “calculating”, was convict-
ed of his murder at Coventry crown
court and sentenced to a minimum of
JIM WILEMAN FOR THE TIMES; TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOPReview into ‘lenient’ sentences for killers of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
29 years. Arthur’s father, Thomas
Hughes, 29, was jailed for 21 years for
manslaughter after encouraging the
killing.
Suella Braverman, the attorney-gen-eral, announced yesterday that both
sentences had been referred to the
Court of Appeal for being too lenient.
When he died Arthur had more than
130 bruises on his body, which, accord-
ing to experts who gave evidence at
Tustin and Hughes’s trial, met the med-
ical definition of child torture.
Detectives uncovered more than 200
audio recordings of Arthur in distress
on Tustin’s phone, including two in
which he could be heard crying and
saying “no one loves me” and “no one is
going to feed me”. Many of the audio
files had been sent to Hughes, who en-couraged Tustin’s abuse to the extent
that at one point he responded: “Just
end him.” Hughes’s “infatuation” with
Tustin had “obliterated” any love for his
son, the sentencing judge, Mr Justice
Mark Wall QC, said.
It emerged after the trial that at least
three warnings from family and teach-
ers about Arthur’s plight had been
ignored, prompting Boris Johnson to
order a wide-ranging review.
Referring the case to the Court of Ap-
peal, Braverman said: “This is an ex-
tremely upsetting and disturbing case,
involving a clearly vulnerable youngchild. Emma Tustin and Thomas
Hughes grossly abused their position of
trust and subjected an innocent child,
who they should have been protecting,
to continued emotional and physical
abuse. I understand how distressing the
public have found this case, but it is my
job to decide if a sentence appears to be
unduly lenient based on the facts of the
case. I have carefully considered the de-
tails of this case, and I have decided to
refer the sentences to the Court of Ap-
peal as I believe them to be too low.”
A date for the hearing at the Court of
Appeal is yet to be set.John Simpson Crime Correspondent
Emma Tustin was jailed for at least 29
years and Thomas Hughes for 21 years