Concern for elderly left without phones in Thatcham

Stephen Halls, who lives in the Midlands but whose 86-year-old mother lives in Westfield Road, said that he moved her out of her home after BT failed to fix the road’s phone lines for three weeks.
Mr Halls said that people living in his mother’s road, many of whom are elderly, have had no way of contacting the outside world for several weeks and that a lot of them have emergency assistance buttons which are run via their landline telephone.
If an emergency occurs within the home and assistance is required, a button is pressed which calls a next of kin.
He said that over the past few weeks, various members of his family had tried to contact BT and if they managed to speak to anybody at all they were told the cause was “a serious outage”.
Mr Halls said that his last option was to move his mother out of her house in case she had a fall – as she did just six weeks ago.
He said: “We are just completely flummoxed. I have brought her to stay with me because she is at risk.
“[BT] are running a big risk that there will be no one to help [the elderly people] – without the phone line, the emergency button doesn’t work. It’s appalling customer service.”
“There has been no communication from BT. My mum said that her neighbours haven’t heard anything from BT and there’s no indication as to when it will be fixed. It’s a lack of care really.”
A spokesman for BT, Ian Read, said: “Reports of a breakdown were first reported on July 29, due to a damaged cable in Roman Way, affecting a small number of customers in the area.
“Engineers visited the site to assess the damage on July 31. There is a gas pipeline near the damaged cable which requires permission from the utility company, before we can safely carry out the complex excavation work.
“Our engineers are working as quickly as possible to restore service and we apologise to those people for the inconvenience caused.”