A DISTRICT councillor has hit out at the lack of communication between agencies after being left without a phone line for over a month.

Councillor Brian Maud, who is also chairman of Rillington Parish Council, said he and more than 20 neighbouring properties had been without telephone or computer services since a lorry severed overhead lines near the level crossing in the village in January.

“We were finally reconnected on Sunday, after 33 days, thanks to Openreach engineers working in bitterly cold and wet conditions throughout the day,” he said.

“But it appears that those who were in a position to get the job sorted are incapable of communicating with each other or the different agencies that could have made such a difference to our predicament, even though they had all the necessary communications at hand.”

Coun Maud said that he had been told by BT/Openreach officials that they had at first planned for a temporary connection of all lines affected. Last Friday, I heard that the railway line was to be closed for a week, so I asked Openreach if they knew this and they had been told the day before and they were not proceeding with the temporary connection but hoped to carry out a permanent repair while the rail line is closed. Why after almost four weeks had nothing been done about resetting the dislodged telephone pole? Were Openreach not told earlier that the line was going to be closed, giving them an opportunity to restore our communications?

“Network Rail and BT must have communicated over this. They both have responsibility of providing what should be a public service. Do they think more about their shareholders?”

A spokesman for Network Rail said: “We were first advised of the work on January 21. We have been working with BT to enable safe access for them to complete it. We had a number of different projects worth about £3.5m being completed while Scarborough Bridge was replaced, so access had to be carefully managed.”

A spokesman for BT said: “This fault was reported to us on January 20 and we attended the same day to ensure the site was safe. The fault was caused by an HGV hitting our network. It must have been a fair size as we needed to replace two poles, plus all the connecting overhead cabling.

“This would usually be a relatively straightforward job. However, engineers attended and established that the overhead cable passes over the railway line so work could not proceed without permission from Network Rail. We are pleased to confirm that service has been restored to Rillington and would like to thank those impacted for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience caused.”