MORE than 1,200 homes in Winsford were left without access to emergency services when 999 lines went down for over an hour.

The incident, blamed on a British Telecom 'glitch', meant that 1,238 homes could not get through on a 999 call for several periods between 4.30pm and 5.45pm last Wednesday, March 7.

A spokesman for BT said: "There were three very short incidents lasting three minutes, five minutes and 15 minutes, when there was a hardware problem.

"As soon as we identified the problem it was rectified by an engineer."