§ Mr. Pawseyasked the Minister of Transport how failures of emergency telephones on motorways are notified to his Department; and what was the total number of individual breakdowns so notified to him for the M6 and M1 motorways for 1977 and 1978 and the first nine months of 1979.
§ Mr. Kenneth ClarkeThe police notify the appropriate maintenance contractor of failures to emergency telephones owned by the Department and they in turn inform the Department. On some sections of motorway the GPO provides and maintains telephones within a national arrangement which does not require it to notify the Department with details of defective equipment.
In the West Midlands region, covering 380 telephones on the M5 and M6, about 120 faults were reported in each of the 76W years 1977 and 1978, including a total of 36 cases of vandalism. 118 faults have been reported in the first nine months of 1979 for the same region, 60 of these being known to be due to strikes of lightning.
Telephones on the M1 motorway were provided and maintained by the Post Office in 1977 and 1978. In March 1979 those telephones on M1 motorway in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire were replaced by the Department's own system consisting of 234 telephones. Since March 1979 to date there have been 29 faults reported on this section of the M1 motorway.
In addition there have recently been two major failures affecting a large number of telephones on the M1 and M6, both of which were caused by faults in Post Office equipment.