Nightmare of village phone chaos finally comes to an end

At the height of the trouble, over half the village was left cut off and a number of elderly people placed at risk because their telephone-based personal alarm systems were not working.

Angry residents - fed up with inaction - finally wrote to BT chief executive Gavin Patterson with their complaints and rallied support from South Downs and Arundel MP Nick Herbert.

The problems started at the beginning of September last year with many left without telephone services through to December. Some were reconnected, only to lose their connection again.

In his letter to Gavin Patterson, parish council chairman Geoff Uren said: “ Amberley is a small parish, with a population of 500 living in about 300 homes. We are not a ‘remote’ community, being less than 60 miles from London, but for the recent telephone problems we may as well be on the other side of the moon.”

But today a spokeswoman for Amberley Parish Council - which has campaigned for action throughout the trouble - said that most people had now had their service restored.

She said that Openreach engineers discovered on December 14 that there was 230m of cable that needed replacing in underground boxes - and they completed the work on December 18.