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The Gas Industry Safety Group has backed National Grid’s plans to include the gas safety number in the sale of its gas distribution businesses.
The group’s chairman Chris Bielby told Utility Week the sale will not materially affect the running of the emergency number, and as it has proven effective with 98 per cent of gas escapes being attended within the hour, “it should be maintained as it is”.
He said: “It works now because it is very efficient and it’s very functional”.
Bielby added that any changes to the operation, such as moving it in-house within each gas distribution company, or creating a separate body would be a “risk to safety” and be immensely costly and complex to implement.
Bielby said: “The system changes needed to bring it in-house would be immense. At the moment the one-stop shop works really well.
“On the ground nothing will fundamentally change, people will just move across, it will be exactly the same. It will be same people who answer the calls, it will just be the shareholders that change”.
Last week shadow energy minister Alan Whitehead called for a fresh approach to the number, adding that just passing the service to “whoever happens to buy it seems to me not appropriate now”.
He also said the service should be rebranded to be independent of any distribution company, but Bielby said this potentially poses the biggest risk to safety.
He said that the average customer is already unaware who provides the service, and is only aware of the number itself.
The number is currently well publicised, being listed in telephone directories, on energy bills, on thousands of fleet vehicles, on carbon monoxide detectors and on every gas meter in the UK.
Each year around 3 million gas escape incidents are attended from calls to the number.
A move to include the gas emergency provision in the new three digit emergency number being launched for the electricity industry was dismissed by the Gas Industry Safety Group on the grounds it “would compromise the existing gas safety regime, would create significant confusion and, most importantly, would be hugely costly to implement”.
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