TENDRING Council declared an emergency after hundreds of paying pensioners were left without an alarm service.

Around 450 vulnerable customers were left without access to Tendring Council's Careline service after a "technical issue" with a phone line in Walton.

The service, which costs £24 per month, sees alarms handed out to customers, ensuring help can be provided in case of an emergency.

When a button is pressed, the call for help is received at a 24-hour control centre in Clacton, where an operator will quickly assess the problem and provide the appropriate help.

The service relies on working phone lines to operate.

An issue with a cable in Walton, on Friday, January 11, meant alerts from call buttons and smoke alarms were not connecting to the control centre.

A Tendring Council spokesman said: "Careline was first made aware of the issue late on Friday, and immediately deployed staff to a sheltered housing scheme in the town to provide support.

"The council declared the issue an emergency incident early on Saturday, and council volunteers were drafted in, as well as the authority's emergency planning team to make contact with those who were potentially vulnerable."

The spokesman confirmed every Careline customer, or a family member or trusted neighbour, was contacted within "a few hours."

Staff went door-to-door to check on every customer who could not be reached by phone.

Paul Honeywood, Tendring councillor responsible for housing, said he would be taking steps to try and prevent the problem from reoccurring in the future.

"This is clearly something that is beyond Careline's control," he said.

"I will raise this with senior officers who look after Careline to see what options are available to us."

He added: "We of course have contingency plans in place for events such as this, but this issue went beyond our ‘business as usual’ work and so we rightly escalated our response accordingly.

“I am extremely proud of our staff who went the extra mile, many working over the weekend beyond their usual shifts, to make sure some of the most vulnerable in our communities were looked after.

“During the call round some of our customers had not even been aware of the fault with the phone line, which demonstrates potentially how isolated some of these people are – and how important our service is."

An Openreach spokeswoman apologised for the outage, which was fixed by Sunday, January 13.

"We’ve investigated the cause thoroughly and cannot find a reason why our cable faulted," she said.

"The faulty cable involved served approximately 600 premises.

"There is another smaller cable nearby, serving approximately 200 premises, that has also shown a fault and we’re repairing that now with works expected to be finished on Thursday, January 17.

"We don’t anticipate any further problems in the area but do ask customers to call their landline or broadband provider if they experience any further problems.”