Some Sutton Bridge residents left without phone line for a month

Telecoms bosses have come under fire after residents were left without a phone line for more than a month.

People living on the outskirts of Sutton Bridge are angry that they didn’t have a working telephone line for four weeks – and have hit out at Openreach, which maintains the network.

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

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

Before the problem was eventually sorted, 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 landline 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.”

Before all the lines were reconnected, a spokesperson for Openreach 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.”