Radio switch to hit rescue team

GOVERNMENT plans to overhaul the charging system for radio channels could have disastrous consequences for mountain rescue teams up and down the country, Oldham Mountain rescue has warned.

OFCOM, the Govern-ment body which oversees the UK radio spectrum, is in the process of reviewing the current charging mechanism for radio channels — in moves that could pile on the cost for land and sea-based rescue teams.

Although the exact costs involved are not yet known, any increase in charges would mean more fund-raising for the 56 mountain rescue teams across England and Wales, including the Oldham team.

There may also be changes made to the frequencies available to Mountain Rescue which could mean them sharing airspace with commercial companies.

David Allan, chairman of Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW), commented: “The radio channels currently used by Mountain Rescue are owned and paid for by the Maritime & Coastguard Agency. If OFCOM decide to increase the costs to the MCA they may well have to pass them on which will have a catastrophic effect on teams’ funding.

“All teams in England and Wales are staffed by volunteers and funded by charitable donations so we could well end up raising funds to simply pass to the Government.”

Peter Hyde, from Oldham Mountain Rescue, said: “For us, the difficulty is not knowing what is going to happen. If they start putting commercial rates into the equation, then voluntary organisations like ourselves will really suffer.

“Our costs have already crept up from £16,000 a year to £20,000 in the last few years and we are wholly reliant on donations from members of the public and from corporate sponsors. All our staff, including people working at national level, are volunteers, but the cost of equipment, insurance and fuel and electricity eats up money.”

A spokesperson for the Mountain Rescue Service said that other emergency services are moving to the Government-backed “Airwave” programme, but this solution is not suitable for teams who operate in wild and remote places outside the coverage of the Airwave system.

He said: “Also, the Mountain Rescue radio systems are not affected by power outages in the same way that Airwave and mobile phone coverage is.

“This proved to be of enormous benefit at incidents such as the Carlisle and Gloucester floods where failures of the systems used by the statutory authorities led to the communications network quickly becoming dependant on the Mountain Rescue radio equipment operated by the teams involved.”