BT is today celebrating the 80th anniversary of the UK’s 999 emergency service – which handles about 2.25 million calls a year across the West Midlands.
The world’s oldest emergency service was launched in London on June 30, 1937.
A fire at a London doctor’s surgery in November 1935, which led to the tragic death of five women, resulted in a committee being set up by the government to look at the problem of how telephone operators could identify emergency calls.
The committee proposed there should be a standard easy-to-remember nationwide number to alert the emergency services. They considered using 707, which corresponded to the letters SOS on the telephone dial and 333, but the technology of the time would not allow these to be used and 999 was chosen as the most practical number.
The Second World War delayed the rollout of the service across the UK, but it was eventually extended to all major towns and cities by 1948, with Birmingham and Coventry two of the first cities outside London to introduce the 999 service.
BT advisors now answer around 560,000 calls a week in the UK – including about 47,000 in the West Midlands. Of around 30 million calls received a year from fixed and mobile phones, more than 97 per cent are answered within five seconds. The early hours of New Year’s Day is traditionally the busiest time of the year when up to 9,000 calls can be received each hour.
Colin Bannon, chairman of BT’s West Midlands regional board, said: “Recent events in the UK mean people are acutely aware of the work of the emergency services and the value of the 999 service.
“I am extremely proud of the BT operators and their role in 999.
“They are a highly competent team working at the sharp end of the most important communication services in the country.
The latest development in the 999 service is Advanced Mobile Location (AML), a new mobile location system, pioneered by BT, to pinpoint 999 calls from mobiles more precisely.
When an emergency call is made with an AML-enabled smartphone, the phone automatically activates its location service and sends its position in a text message to the 999 service.
AML is up to 4,000 times more accurate than existing location systems. It is now integrated into the Android operating system in the UK and is being adopted across Europe and the rest of the world.