Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps he is taking to ensure that the vulnerability registers maintained by energy providers are shared with telecommunications providers to prioritise additional support for vulnerable customers during the Public Switched Telephone Network migration.

The Government is committed to ensuring that vulnerable people are identified and appropriately supported during the Public Switched Telephone Network migration. For legal and data protection reasons, data on vulnerable people from energy providers cannot be shared with communication providers. Instead, communication providers committed in the Non-Voluntary Migrations Checklist to sign data sharing agreements with local authorities to identify vulnerable people.

In addition, BT and Virgin Media funded, with government support, a national communications campaign to encourage vulnerable people to self-identify. Communication providers have also used data from alarm receiving centres, alongside their individual/standard approaches to identifying vulnerable customers via outreach.