Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am aware of these concerns and I have received documentation from individuals. I thank the Deputy for raising the issue. I fully appreciate the fact that the emergency call answering service, ECAS, has been operating to an extremely high standard, with the dedication of the operators and the quality of the service they provide being a major contributor to this. The ECAS operators handle calls effectively and efficiently, often in response to stressful and distressing situations for citizens. The service answers more than 2 million calls annually and has one of the fastest emergency call answering times in Europe.

BT Ireland has operated ECAS on behalf of my Department under a concession agreement since July 2010 and is responsible for the conditions and resourcing of the service. BT Ireland employs a third party contractor, Conduit Ireland Limited, to provide operators to answer calls. Operators at ECAS call answering centres in Navan, Ballyshannon and Dublin process emergency calls and forward these to the appropriate emergency service as quickly and effectively as possible. BT Ireland uses an industry standard model to determine the number of operators required across each centre. It forecasts the number of operators required to meet the necessary operational requirements on a monthly basis and notifies Conduit six weeks in advance. BT Ireland has a health and safety policy of having a minimum of two operators on each site at any one time. This facilitates appropriate breaks, ensures the work environment is safe and allows operators time to recover if they have taken especially stressful calls. In addition, BT line managers directly answer calls if required.

The number and cost of operators is assessed annually by the Commission for Communications Regulation as part of its annual review of the cost of the ECAS service. An expert report commissioned by ComReg is appended to this review. The latest expert report was appended to a decision on costs by ComReg published in January 2015. The expert report states that ECAS "is run effectively against the service targets and quality requirements and overall is approaching 'leading practice' from a performance perspective". Furthermore, ComReg's review concluded that an increase to the operator’s hourly rate was reasonable and notified BT Ireland accordingly. This is a matter now for BT and Conduit and I understand that discussions between the two companies are advanced, with a view to addressing ComReg's findings. I hope, therefore, that the matter can be dealt with quickly, given the important service that ECAS operators provide.

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