The reliability of the UK’s electricity and gas supplies during a national crisis is being threatened by utility firms’ reliance on mobile phones, Computing can reveal.

Commercial mobile networks use mains power and can only withstand small power cuts.

So a major, wide-area outage – such as that affecting more than 200,000 people across the US and Canada last October – would leave engineers working to restore key utilities unable to communicate.

The situation represents a real danger to the UK critical national infrastructure, experts warn.

‘There is a prospective weakness in the utility sector, arising from its dependence on public mobile phone systems, in some credible circumstances of major disturbance such as extreme weather conditions,’ said energy networks consultant Chris Mortley.

Previously, the nationalised utilities maintained an independent, fully resilient private mobile radio (PMR) infrastructure. But less than half the country is still covered, a Computing investigation found.

In the electricity sector only distributors in Scotland, Wales and the north-east and south-west of England maintain the PMR. In the gas sector, it is used only in Scotland. The rest of the country relies on mobile phones.

‘Collectively, utilities have become slightly unmindful about the need for resilient communications, and because commercial telecoms are so complex there is a degree of ignorance about the vulnerabilities,’ said Mortley.

Dependencies between services need attention, says Jim Norton, senior policy adviser at the Institute of Directors.

‘Since privatisation no one has taken an overview across the utilities, looking at how telecoms links to gas and gas links to electricity,’ said Norton.

‘Unless we think about the UK infrastructure as a complete system, a major cascade of failures is inevitable,’ he said.

Government involvement is similarly fragmented.

The Civil Contingencies Secretariat is responsible for the critical national infrastructure and publishes business continuity guidelines for incidents including power cuts of up to three days. But enquiries about utilities resilience are passed to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

‘There are working groups examining this issue to develop best practice advice and boost cross-sector working to improve resilience,’ said a DTI spokeswoman.

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