Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress her Department is making on the development and roll out of the Emergency Services Network; and when rural communities will be able to connect to that network in order to have mobile connectivity in areas where there is otherwise none.

The Home Office’s Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme (ESMCP), is building a new Emergency Services Network (ESN) to replace the current Airwave network used by the Emergency Services as well as a range of other users.

The software that ESN runs on is being provided by Motorola Solutions and the infrastructure is being built by EE; created by upgrading their existing network, including deploying more 4G radio frequencies in rural areas.

To maximise coverage for the emergency services the government will build 292 further sites in the most remote and rural areas of Britain. These sites will also form part of the Shared Rural Network.

To support ESN, we need to activate these masts before ESN goes live for emergency services users. Detailed plans are still being refined but we currently expect ESN to be fully operational during 2025. As individual masts are activated as part of the ESN programme, they will be available to EE’s commercial customers immediately, even before ESN itself is live. Wherever possible, we have chosen a “future-proofed” design for these mast structures, meaning that they can be easily upgraded to allow access by all of the UK’s commercial mobile operators to improve coverage to communities.

ESMCP remains a complex and challenging programme. Over the past year, core elements of the technology have been delivered. The ‘push-to-talk’ solution now works with ESN devices connected to EE’s commercial network. The Air-to-Ground solution, interworking with Airwave and Control Room integration have all been successfully demonstrated. A ‘data only’ service is also in operational use by an increasing number of emergency services users. The programme is now working to complete development of the core technology, and deliver additional coverage including for rural areas and London Underground. We currently expect to switch off Airwave during 2025 once we have completed the technology delivery and proving and then deployment to users.