The £3bn police radio network will last only a few hours in the event of a mains power blackout caused by accidents, freak weather or terrorist attacks, a Computing investigation can reveal.

The Airwave network’s five-hour backup supply falls short of the government’s own business continuity recommendations.

‘Loss of mains electricity supply for up to three days locally or 24 hours regionally’ is included in the Cabinet Office’s business continuity planning assumptions.

And UK Resilience, the information service for emergency practitioners run by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, specifies planning for a ‘total shutdown of electricity supply over an entire region occurring during working hours and lasting for 24 hours’.

According to a Freedom of Information Act response from the Police IT Organisation (Pito), which specified and bought the network, the length of time that Airwave can operate in the event of a loss of mains power will depend on the individual component affected. ‘Typically, backup power supplies will last for up to five hours,’ said Pito.

Airwave supplier O2 says the network’s key nodes are equipped with standby generators.

But the 3,000 base stations that transmit to and from officers’ handsets rely on battery backup, and without them the radios will not work.

Five hours is simply not long enough, says Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Glen Smyth.

‘If something can go wrong, at some point it will, and then you are only as good as your backup systems,’ he said.

O2 plans to equip 35 per cent of Airwave base stations with standby generators. But the programme will not be completed until the end of next year, more than two years after the service was rolled out to all police forces.

‘This is a huge capability gap,’ said Conservative security minister Patrick Mercer. ‘It is incredible that so little thought has been given to the backup necessary for the police network.’

Used by more than 150,000 police officers, Airwave is also being rolled out to the ambulance and fire services.

A spokeswoman for O2 said: ‘The network was designed with a range of resilience measures, including powering arrangements, and further improvements are in progress at the moment.’

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