He added that “when the power goes out people don’t have the phone, they don’t have the internet and often they don’t have a mobile signal either”.
Telecoms firms have been distributing backup battery packs to vulnerable customers, offering roughly an hour or more of landline use during outages.
Mr Crichton threw out the measure as “simply not adequate” , explaining mobile providers “simply don’t have the means to maintain or keep their signal going during storms”.
He called on the minister to push telecoms companies to “up their digital game” to safeguard people “on the edge where people are vulnerable, isolated from their neighbours, where the ambulance is an hour away and the storm is 70 miles an hour”.
Markus Campbell-Savours, Labour MP for Penrith and Solway, also piped up over the same concern.
He said: “I ask the minister to imagine an elderly constituent living alone in an isolated Lake District valley where copper phone lines have been replaced by fibre.”