The 2027 Landline Switch-Off: Will Your Pendant Alarm Still Work?
It's two in the morning. Your dad has slipped coming back from the bathroom and cannot get up. He presses the red button on his chest and, seconds later, a real person is asking him questions through the base unit. That call has travelled for decades over the copper wire in the wall. That wire is being switched off.
By the end of January 2027, the UK's old analogue phone network stops working. Home phones move onto your broadband connection — voice over internet protocol, VoIP for short. For most households the change is dull: you plug the same phone into the back of the router instead of the wall socket. But a pendant alarm is not most households. So the question every telecare user is entitled to ask is a simple one. Does that include the alarm?
What is actually happening to the line
The copper network — the public switched telephone network, or PSTN — is, on the government's own telling, becoming increasingly unreliable. Openreach has moved 16 to 17 million lines across already. Around 1.3 million copper lines are still running, the Guardian reported this week. Every one of them has to move by the end of January 2027.
The government's framing is calm: a necessary national upgrade, broadly expected to be completed in 2027. Fair enough. Infrastructure ages.
Why the pendant is the hard part
Upwards of 2 million people in the UK use telecare — pendant alarms, night alarms, fall sensors, gas and door sensors. Most of those devices were fitted twenty or thirty years ago for one kind of line. An analogue one that is always powered from the telephone exchange, and keeps working when your broadband doesn't.
That is why the switchover is delicate. A digital voice line rides on your router, and your router needs mains power. A power cut can then take out the internet and, in a badly configured setup, the alarm's ability to dial out. Campaigners have warned about exactly this, and rural households with patchy mobile signal worry about it most.
Not hypothetical. In December, Virgin Media was fined £23.8 million after thousands of customers — typically older and disabled people — lost access to their alarms during its 2023 transition. The fallout paused forced migrations and pushed the copper retirement back from December 2025 to the end of January 2027.
The government's own action plan puts it in one plain sentence. The job is to avoid a care line failing "during a fall in the middle of the night because nobody made sure it worked properly with new technology."
What the government promises
The health and technology departments have jointly published a Telecare National Action Plan, and its central promise is a good one. No telecare user gets migrated to a digital line unless the provider, the customer, or the telecare service confirms a compatible, working setup is in place. No switch first, fix later.
Councils are meant to pass on their telecare lists, so the people most at risk get prioritised. The plan gets reviewed every six months, and providers signed up to a new checklist before any forced migration.
One honest caveat. The plan covers England. The switchover happens in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too, and Whitehall's line is "sharing best practice" with the devolved governments. If Mum is in Swansea and you are in Manchester, ring her council rather than assuming the promises travel with her.
The letter you shouldn't bin
This month BT was accused of "bullying" by Silver Voices founder Dennis Reed, after reports that it temporarily paused broadband for customers who had ignored switchover letters for two years. Read the detail and note two things. They got five days' notice, and their landline stayed live — BT says telecare devices kept working throughout. Over 80% of that group then finally moved.
The pressure tactics are ugly, and Age UK is right that the deadline "should not mark a hard-and-fast cliff edge" for older customers who still haven't switched. But binning the letter is the genuinely dangerous move. BT's own research found 63% of UK adults admit delaying essential admin, and 29% admit ignoring messages from essential services. Your pendant should not be in that 29%.
Five minutes on the phone, before the date
Every alarm provider and council telecare team already knows how to handle the switchover. What protects your parent is one phone call before the switch date, not after the first failed test.
Ask three things. Is the alarm dialler-based — does it dial out over the landline? If so, what replaces it: a mobile-SIM alarm that rides the 4G network, or a properly configured digital-voice setup? And who fits it, then tests it?
Then ask about power cuts. BT is giving battery backup units and free engineer home visits to customers registered as vulnerable. Its digital landline also blocked more than 91 million scam and spam attempts last year — small bonuses for someone who gets targeted anyway.
If your relative has no broadband at all, ask about the dedicated landline service. BT says it keeps the phone working much as today, with no new equipment and no engineer visit, until 2030. If the alarm is nearing the end of its life anyway, our guide to UK medical alarm systems and our personal alarms for older people review cover what to buy now.
After any switch or replacement, press the button. Test it with the monitoring centre on the day, and again a month later. Alarms fail quietly.
If you only remember one thing
The deadline is not the dangerous moment. The untested alarm three months later is. So find out when the switchover is booked. Then ring the alarm provider — the council telecare team too, if the council funds the alarm — and get any replacement fitted and tested in the same visit. It's a phone call, not a project. Make it this month, while the copper still rings.
A word on limits. This is a guide to phone wiring and service contracts, not medical or care advice. If your parent's alarm was arranged through the council, it came out of a care assessment. Keep that social services team in the loop before anything changes. And if a fall, or a spell of unsteadiness, is the reason you're reviewing the alarm at all, talk to their GP about that too.
Last updated: 2026-10-07