Time to stop ESN ‘madness’?

As the Government’s Emergency Services Network (ESN) faces yet more scrutiny in the wake of a new report expressing “serious concerns about the provision of emergency service communications in Great Britain”, critics believe it could be time to “stop the madness and begin again”.

The latest Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report warns that a plan to take part of the existing communications system out of service early “strikes a major, potentially catastrophic blow to the ability of the emergency services to carry out their job and keep citizens safe” (see p5).

Its concerns arise from the intention of Vodafone, a key supplier to Airwave, to stop providing an important piece of infrastructure from March 2020 that the current Tetra (terrestrial trunked radio) blue light communications system requires to function, “essentially turning it off”.

The report also highlights the “significant and imminent risk” to the ESN programme of providing emergency communications underground.

Renowned Tetra authority Peter Clemons, one of the most vocal critics of the new ESN, says it is further evidence that it is “simply no longer viable in its current form”.

“When will Home Office and the ESN project team finally admit that they underestimated the task at hand?” said Mr Clemons, founder and managing director of critical communications consulting firm Quixoticity, and senior adviser at public telecommunications company Bravo.

“And that they seriously misjudged the ability of the commercial sector to take on mission-critical responsibilities, failed to study all the available options, failed to listen to the critical communications community, failed to understand the full range of human factors involved and accepted intolerable levels of risk that will obviously not be borne by the ESN team itself but by frontline emergency services personnel.”

He said that for a number of years, a growing number of critical communications experts from the UK and around the world “have been watching with horror as the Government has attempted to deliver a next-generation communications network for public safety and emergency services personnel”.

“At times it has been painful to watch, at other times almost comical, to listen to the arguments justifying the radical course that has been taken – to switch off the existing highly-reliable, trusted and dependable nationwide Airwave Tetra solution and jump straight to an unproven pre-standards, commercial solution shared with the public and not reaching the same geographical coverage as its predecessor,” commented Mr Clemons in his regular LinkedIn post.

His views are echoed by the international testing, engineering and consulting services company P3 Group, which said it was a “world first” for the Government to “replace such a dedicated network and service with a service procured from a commercial mobile network operator”.

The ESN will be provided by EE, utilising its 4G LTE (long-term evolution) national network to give ‘next generation’ broadband voice and data services to all UK emergency services.

LTE offers unrivalled broadband capabilities for applications such as body-worn video streaming, digital imaging, automatic vehicle location, computer-assisted dispatch, mobile and command centre apps and video surveillance apps, such as facial recognition.

However, a critical report by the National Audit Office (NAO) last year said the planned replacement for the Airwave system was “inherently high risk” as a similar network has never been implemented elsewhere.

It said only South Korea has attempted a similar project in the past, which was far less risky because part of its spectrum is reserved specifically for emergency services users.

Sir Amyas Morse, the NAO’s Comptroller and Auditor General, said at the time that “the need to save money and get out of a difficult commercial relationship has led the Government to try to move to an approach that is not yet used nationwide anywhere in the world”.

He added: “The programme remains inherently high risk and while