A 2025 government plan promised a deadline for phasing out failure-prone analogue telecare alarms within months. Its own new guidance, 20 months on, admits most are still analogue - and still sets no deadline.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
In short. In February 2025, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology jointly promised that government would "communicate a deadline" for phasing out failure-prone analogue telecare alarms "in the coming months." On 8 October 2026, DHSC published new guidance for the part of the sector its own commissioned research found furthest behind, housing providers running shared "grouped living" alarm systems, three-quarters of which are still analogue. The new guidance contains no deadline, no dedicated fund for housing providers to pay for the upgrade, and describes the switchover's past harms in vaguer terms than the department's own 2025 plan did. Three documented mistakes: four stars.
Most people picture telecare as a pendant: the button an older or disabled relative wears round their neck to call for help if they fall. DHSC's own figures put about 2 million people in the UK behind that picture, relying on a device that, until recently, almost always worked over an ordinary analogue phone line [2]. That line is being switched off. Communication providers are retiring the UK's analogue network, the public switched telephone network or PSTN, in favour of digital lines, a process due to finish by 31 January 2027 [1]. Analogue telecare devices are not reliably compatible with the new lines. Government's own account of why this matters is blunt: "There have been serious incidents, including a small number of fatalities, where telecare devices have failed to work properly after the switchover" [2].
That admission sits in the Telecare National Action Plan, published jointly by DHSC and DSIT on 11 February 2025. Twenty months on, DHSC has followed it with "Telecare and the digital switchover: guidance for housing providers," published 8 October 2026 and aimed squarely at the sub-sector the plan's own research has found is lagging worst [1]. Reading the two side by side is less a story of progress than of a promise that quietly stopped being made.
A deadline promised three times, and never delivered
The 2025 plan is explicit that letting analogue telecare limp on indefinitely is not acceptable. Its second headline outcome is stated plainly: "use of analogue telecare devices is phased out to ensure that only digital devices are being used" [2]. But the plan does not set that deadline itself. In the section explaining that outcome, it says: "Government will work with telecare suppliers and telecare service providers to establish a feasible timeline for analogue telecare devices to be phased out and will communicate a deadline in the coming months" [2]. The same commitment is repeated word for word under Action 1.2, and again under Action 2.2, where the plan's own "Timeline" field reads: "A feasible deadline for fully phasing out analogue telecare will be established and communicated" [2].
Twenty months is not "the coming months" by any reading. More to the point, the document best placed to deliver on that promise, this October's guidance for housing providers, does not even raise it. It reports that "around three-quarters of grouped living scheme telecare alarms are still analogue," against DHSC's own commissioned research with alarm receiving centres carried out across winter 2025 to 2026 and again in May and June 2026, and that "for personal alarms, around one-third are analogue" [1]. It says housing providers have been "aware of the digital phone switchover since 2017" and that "further action is now urgently needed to reduce risks" [1]. The only hard date anywhere in it is the PSTN network's own closure, 31 January 2027, a date about the phone line, not about telecare compliance. The analogue-telecare deadline the 2025 plan promised three times does not appear once.
The sector told to act fastest is the one given no fund to do it with
The 2025 plan is equally explicit that money has already been found for part of the sector: local authorities. It cites the Adult Social Care Technology Fund backing "numerous local authorities," naming a £1 million grant that let Redbridge Council roll out fall-prevention technology to 300 residents, and a near-£1.2 million grant that let Shropshire Council do the same, this time with the Digitising Social Care programme and the Adult Social Care Digital Transformation Fund covering the cost so that "there is no cost to the resident" [2]. Every fund named is for councils. Neither document names a single pound of central funding earmarked for housing providers, the group the October guidance says is furthest behind.
The October guidance's own case studies show what that gap means in practice. Trinity Estates found that "replacing with a new integrated system had significant costs and would have resulted in substantial increases to residents' service charges," and chose a cheaper personal-alarm replacement instead [1]. Bromford Housing went further: facing "budget pressures" that made "transitioning to a new fully digital alarm... a significant financial challenge," it decommissioned its grouped living alarm system entirely and moved residents who still needed telecare onto a "private pay model" with a commercial provider, "transitioning from a free or reduced-cost service to a paid-for model" [1]. The guidance presents both as success stories, workable solutions reached through good consultation. What they also show is a safety-critical upgrade the government itself demands being paid for by cutting the service or passing the cost to residents, because the fund that exists for exactly this problem was never extended to the organisations the guidance is written for.
What "serious incidents" used to mean
The two documents' own language is a smaller but telling gap. The 2025 plan's account of why the switchover is dangerous names the worst outcome directly: "serious incidents, including a small number of fatalities" [2]. The October guidance, written for the audience the department's own evidence says is most exposed, drops the word. Its equivalent line reads only that "past serious incidents have highlighted the importance of safeguarding these individuals" [1], with no mention that any of those incidents were fatal. It is a document written specifically because three-quarters of this group's alarms are still analogue; the one word that explains why that number should alarm a reader is the one word it does not use.
The 2025 plan also discloses a gap in the regulatory floor itself that the October guidance does not revisit. Ofcom requires communication providers to give customers reliant on a landline for 999 calls a battery back-up solution for power cuts. Telecare alarms do not dial 999, so, in the plan's own words: "There is no regulatory requirement for communication providers to ensure uninterrupted access for telecare devices... As telecare devices do not dial 999, there is no obligation to ensure uninterrupted access to telecare calls" [2]. That gap has stood since at least February 2025. It still stands.
The claims, tested
| The document's own words | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Government will work with telecare suppliers and telecare service providers to establish a feasible timeline for analogue telecare devices to be phased out and will communicate a deadline in the coming months" (Telecare National Action Plan, 11 Feb 2025) [2] | Twenty months later, DHSC's own new guidance to the worst-performing sub-sector sets out urgency but no deadline for analogue phase-out, only the unrelated PSTN network closure date [1] | The promise was never kept, and the document that should have kept it does not acknowledge it was made |
| "Housing providers are a significant part of the telecare sector," urgently needing to upgrade [1] | The Adult Social Care Technology Fund, DiSC and ASC DTF, the only funding the government names anywhere in either document, are described solely as supporting local authorities [2] | An unfunded mandate: the group told to move fastest is not named as eligible for the money that exists |
| "Past serious incidents have highlighted the importance of safeguarding these individuals" (guidance for housing providers, 8 Oct 2026) [1] | The department's own 2025 plan had already disclosed that those incidents included "a small number of fatalities" [2] | The more recent, more targeted document is the vaguer one about what is actually at stake |
Credit where due
Neither document hides the scale of the problem, and that is itself worth crediting. DHSC commissioned real fieldwork, surveying a sample of alarm receiving centres twice within six months, and published the resulting three-quarters-still-analogue figure about its own policy area rather than sitting on it [1]. The October guidance's practical content is genuinely useful: detailed, specific advice on fire safety and British Standards for integrated alarm systems, a live contact address for housing providers that communication providers have not yet reached for data sharing, and five real named case studies, Guinness, Clarion, Monmouthshire, Trinity Estates and Bromford, that do not airbrush the difficulty or cost of what they went through [1]. The 2025 plan, too, volunteered the fatalities admission and the 999 regulatory gap unprompted; nothing in either document was extracted by a Freedom of Information request or a leak. The government is not hiding this problem. It has simply not yet done the two things, set a deadline and named a route to pay for it, that its own 2025 plan said it would.
Verdict
Four stars, from three documented mistakes. This is not a case of a document making a claim the evidence contradicts; the pattern here is omission; a promise not repeated, a fund not extended, a word not used; which is a quieter failure mode but not a smaller one. With the PSTN switch-off sixteen weeks away from this guidance's publication date and three-quarters of one alarm type still analogue, the gap between what the 2025 plan said government would do and what the 2026 guidance actually contains is the kind of gap that, on this department's own account, has already cost lives once.
The star score counts three documented mistakes: the Telecare National Action Plan's promise, made three times in February 2025, to "communicate a deadline" for phasing out analogue telecare within "the coming months," which the department's own most recent and most targeted guidance, 20 months later, does not mention, let alone meet; the absence of any funding route for housing providers in either document, when the only fund named anywhere is explicitly restricted to local authorities, while the guidance's own case studies show housing providers cutting services or moving residents to paid private provision to cover the cost; and the softening of the 2025 plan's own disclosed "small number of fatalities" into the vaguer "past serious incidents" in the 2026 guidance aimed at the sub-sector found furthest from compliance. Three falls in the 1 to 3 band: four stars; the bands are on the ratings page. This piece makes no finding that housing providers or DHSC have acted in bad faith; the organisations named in the guidance's own case studies, Guinness, Clarion, Monmouthshire, Trinity Estates and Bromford, are shown working through a genuinely difficult and costly transition without evasion. The finding is narrower: that a specific, three-times-repeated government commitment from February 2025 has not been met, and the document that should have been the vehicle for meeting it does not say so. Checked directly against the full text of both the Telecare National Action Plan and the October 2026 housing-providers guidance, both fetched 9 October 2026.
Sources
- Telecare and the digital switchover: guidance for housing providers, GOV.UK, Department of Health and Social Care, published 8 October 2026
- Telecare National Action Plan: protecting telecare users throughout the digital phone switchover, GOV.UK, Department of Health and Social Care and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, published 11 February 2025