Sir Chris Bonington

The clamour against Ofcom’s plans to charge mountain rescuers for using their radios is growing, with Everest summiteer and climbing elder statesman Sir Chris Bonington among those calling on Gordon Brown to reject the idea.

Since we carried our update yesterday, the number of names on the Downing Street e-petition has more than trebled, with 669 names added to the list, among them luminaries such as Sir Christian, CBE; one holder of the OBE, and six MBEs. Clearly, most mountain lovers and members of the volunteer rescue teams think charging the charities which rescue hillwalkers and climbers is a bad idea.

The furore has arisen because Ofcom, the Government watchdog in charge of, among other things, controlling radio communication in Britain, wants to apply market forces to the carve up of the radio spectrum to ensure it is used efficiently.

Leaving aside the current problems caused by the supposed efficiency of market forces as applied to the financial sector, most among the rescue community think the possibility of being charged to go and rescue people in danger on Britain’s mountains is a thoroughly bad idea.

Mountain Rescue England and Wales, the umbrella body for all the rescue teams south of the border, issued a statement to grough.

It said: “Whilst the cost of any change imposed by Ofcom cannot be estimated at the current time, any charge will mean additional fund raising for the 56 teams within MREW, none of which receive funding from Government. In addition, there may be changes made to the frequencies available to Mountain Rescue which could mean them sharing airspace with commercial companies.”

David Allan, chairman of MREW added: “The radio channels currently used by mountain rescue are owned and paid for by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

“If Ofcom decides 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.

“Even if Ofcom decided to discount the charge by 100 per cent, that wouldn’t stop them changing the discount at some time in the future. We really need to be permanently exempt from these charges and for the frequencies allocated to us to be left alone.”

The possibility of MRTs using the same system as the police is a non-starter.  MREW said: “Other emergency services are moving to the Government-backed Airwave programme but this solution is not suitable for the teams, who operate in wild and remote places outside the coverage of the Airwave system.

“In addition, 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 dependent on the mountain rescue radio equipment operated by the teams involved.”

The current Ofsted consultation, which affects Scottish teams too, ends on 30 October. Members of the public can make their submission by visiting the Ofcom website.

If you want to support the country’s mountain rescue teams in their battle against charging, the e-petition is on the Downing Street website.

See also

Appeal to Gordon Brown to stop mountain-rescue radio charges

Mountain rescue radio plans ‘put lives at risk’