Some Sutton Bridge residents left without phone line for three weeks

Telecoms bosses have come under fire after residents have been left without a phone line for nearly a month.

People living on the outskirts of Sutton Bridge are angry to have not had a working telephone line for just over three weeks – and have hit out at Openreach, which maintains the network.

Residents in Curlew Lodge Lane and Guys Head Road have been affected by the outage and struggle to use their mobile phones as the signal is poor within that area.

Openreach engineers have been to the area to try to resolve the problem.

One of the people affected is Coun Michael Booth, who is also a farmer who needs his phone line to communicate with customers.

He said: “We have been off for three weeks. They have given us dates of when it will be fixed – the last time was midnight on Wednesday last week and by Friday it had still not been resolved.

“I can’t get my phone diverted to my mobile and if you call my landlane it gives an engaged tone all the time. I have been told that there are occasions when the answer phone kicks in.

“It took four hours to report a break-down. It is absolutely disgusting.”

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A spokesperson for Openreach has said its engineers have been on site and made good progress yesterday (Monday).

He said: “We’re doing everything we can to get people reconnected and understand how frustrating being without broadband and phone services is. Our engineers have been working hard to carry out the repair work, and they’ll be back today (Tuesday) to start the process of reconnecting properties to the network.”