Call to improve phone coverage to help farmer safety

A farming leader in the Peak District has said poor mobile signal in the area is making his industry more dangerous.

New data from technology company Ookla has ranked the High Peak as the worst area in Britain for getting a mobile phone signal.

Andrew Critchlow, a National Farmers Union (NFU) county adviser, said: "There are 'not spots' (where there is no signal) for any kind of phone company and that's pretty dangerous then for farmers because you have got a lot of lone working."

High Peak borough councillor Joanna Collins said service could be "patchy" or "erratic", but "it's not like we are so remote we cannot get any mobile phone signal at all".

Collins, of Edale in Derbyshire, said proposals for more phone masts in the area had often been "unpopular".

"There have been ideas about putting mobile phone masts in but there is opposition to that for various reasons," she said, "because it's a national park, because everyone who lives here wants to preserve its special qualities."

Critchlow, who has a sheep farm in Edale, said farmers often needed to use a variety of apps, but it proves difficult if mobile signal is poor.

"If there's an accident or some kind of emergency, if you haven't got a phone signal, that can put your life at risk," he said.

"The world runs off technology and it is no different in farming.

"Data is all important and if the signal doesn't work efficiently then you can't do your job efficiently."

Emma Simpson, chief executive of the charity Rural Action Derbyshire, which has a project that provides digital training for community groups, said: "Rural areas are always worse off for digital connectivity and mobile phone usage than the urban areas.

"But the High Peak is the most sparsely populated and the most remote of the districts in Derbyshire.

"So it's not really a surprise, but it makes it really hard for businesses."

Matthew Wright, who runs Allied Taxis in Buxton, said poor mobile coverage made the work of his drivers challenging.

He said the coverage was good in Buxton town centre but drivers who took customers to outlying villages now took payment in advance because bank card readers are unreliable in rural spots.

Ookla measures how well mobile phone technology works across Britain and supplies data to Ofcom and other international governments.

Its Europe analyst, Luke Kehoe, said the "very poor" service in the High Peak was caused by a shortage of adequate mobile phone masts but he acknowledged that the hilly nature of the area made it harder and more expensive to install them.

Ookla collects this data through partnerships it has with the manufacturers of apps that send what are called "background scans", which reveal the apps' connectivity. The data is only gathered from Android phones.

It found that there was no signal to phones in the High Peak 5.42% of the time, which put it ahead of Orkney and Shetland Islands, which was in second place.

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