This document concerns the ability of emergency authorities (such as the Police, Fire and Rescue service, Ambulance and Coastguard) to identify the location of people making 999 or 112 calls. Accurate and reliable location information significantly helps the emergency authorities in delivering urgent assistance to those in need.
Last year, we published a Call for Inputs seeking views and evidence from stakeholders as to whether our regulation needed to be revised to improve the information that the emergency authorities currently receive.
The Call for Inputs focussed on location information for callers using mobile phones as we considered that this represented the area in which enhanced accuracy and reliability might be most needed. Emergency calls made from conventional landlines (which are traditionally fixed to a specific address) means that location information passed to the emergency authorities is already almost invariably accurate.
Since our Call for Inputs, the UK mobile industry has concluded trials of a new approach to providing location information which is now beginning to be implemented by operators and mobile handset manufacturers. In this document we welcome this industry initiative and intend to monitor how it develops. At this stage, therefore, we propose not to take any further formal action.
