London's emergency services experience telecoms failure

The telephone communication systems used by the police, fire and ambulance services in London failed earlier, it has emerged.

The secure system, known as Airwave, helps emergency services to communicate. It failed from 09:00 to 09:40 BST, the BBC's Danny Shaw said.

Airwave Solutions Ltd has confirmed there was "an issue with intermittent communications".

The Met Police said the problem was believed to have been a power failure.

London Ambulance Service said it lost Airwave for less than 40 minutes and the impact on operations was minimal.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police service: "Maintaining our service to the public and officer safety were our first considerations during the outage period, and measures were put in place to ensure it was maintained."

It said Airwave was putting measures in place to avoid any repeat of the problem.

"We were very lucky to avoid anything too bad," a police source told BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw earlier.