A LIFEBOAT team is contemplating a major drain on its funds after a telecoms group announced it would be ditching its pager service.

Duddon Inshore Rescue is being forced to throw away £1,000 worth of O2 pagers it invested in 18 months ago after O2 said its radio pager system would stop at the end of the year.

The self-funding search and rescue group uses its pagers to instantly alert its 25-strong crew to call-outs in the Duddon Estuary a stretch that the nearby RNLI at Roa Island, near Barrow, cannot reliably cover because the tide routinely cuts off the estuary.

"It's staggering we are having to replace them so soon," complained Duddon crew member Father Mark Edwards. "As a lifeboat organisation, if we don't have these pagers, lives will be put at risk.

"We chose the O2 system because it cost only 43p for a group message. The suggested alternative would cost £9.50 per pager per month, meaning our bill would rise from around £50 a year to around £3,000."

The pager problem was making a difficult problem worse, added Mr Edwards, because the group was already working hard to raise another £25,000 to pay for a new £50,000 lifeboat that would meet new EU regulations.

"We have to find that money, we can't just ignore it. It's going to delay us having our new boat operational."

O2 suggested the team used text messaging instead but Mr Edwards said that was unworkable. Activating all 25 pagers took 30 seconds but it could take from five minutes to 24 hours for a text message to come through, depending on how busy the network was.

"We feel O2 have been quite blas about it and haven't given any consideration to the people it's going to affect. I understand the economics of it, but from a human point of view I find it staggering. It's going to affect so many other emergency services."

Around 142,000 people will be hit by the O2 switch-off, including other search and rescue groups. However, in Cumbria, most emergency services will remain largely unaffected. Cumbria Ambulance Service uses Vodafone pagers as do Cumbria Police and most mountain rescue teams. Cockermouth and Wasdale Mountain Rescue do use O2 but John Dempster, the chairman of mountain rescue umbrella organisation - the Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association said both teams used the more expensive O2 rental pager service so switching to another provider would not necessarily put up costs.

O2 spokesman Dave Massey said it was simply no longer commercially viable for the company to offer the pager service.

With the rising popularity of mobile phones, people were using pagers less, he said, Indeed, when the firm took the decision to withdraw pagers in May, less than four in ten of their pagers had been used in the last three months.

"We recognise there will still be organisations that still want to use pagers, therefore part of our decision recognised that there were still other paging networks in the UK. We have set up a relationship with Page One so we can forward details of those customers."

Meanwhile, Duddon Inshore Rescue is appealing for donations to help meet the cost of a new pager system and its new boat appeal. Anyone who can help should contact Mr Edwards on 01229-839686.