THE firm responsible for replacing the North York Moors TV transmitter destroyed by fire is being urged to name the date when full television coverage will resume.

The Bilsdale transmitter supplied 670,000 households in North Yorkshire, York, Teesside and County Durham with their favourite programmes before the blaze in August 2021 months ago.

Five months ago, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he had been assured full services from the new 314-metre transmitter would resume by Spring.

But some viewers are still receiving patchy coverage.

Now the leaders of all the major political groups on the new North Yorkshire Council have said residents deserved to be given the firm’s approximate date for completing works on the replacement mast.

A spokesman for the firm said: “It is meteorologically dependent at the moment.”

In November, apologising for “ongoing disruption” to residents, Arqiva’s chief officer Shuja Khan said the firm was working to restore full services in “a significantly shorter timeframe” than the two-year period such projects were expected to take.

The authority’s Independent group leader, Cllr Stuart Parsons, said residents’ TV programmes were still frequently being interrupted by a loss of signal 20 months on from the fire.

He said: “Arqiva reassured the Prime Minister it would all be done by Spring. If the reassurance they gave him isn’t worth the paper it is written on it’s rather worrying. It’s very unfair people are still having to pay their TV licence for a botched service.”

Cllr Steve Shaw Wright, the council’s Labour group leader, said it was “appalling” that a better intermediate temporary resolution had not been provided to residents.

He said: “I was watching pictures from Mars yesterday and we have had TV signals for nearly a century and yet we can’t even get a get a signal across the North York Moors. It’s unfathomable. Rishi Sunak needs to do something now.”

North Yorkshire’s leader of the opposition, Liberal Democrat Cllr Bryn Griffiths, said given Spring had arrived Arqiva should be able to forecast within a few weeks of when full services would be restored.

Council leader Conservative Cllr Carl Les said he “fully accepted the difficulties and inconvenience” that residents were having due to intermittent outages and poor signals.

“It was an unprecedented disaster for Arqiva and it’s been a big task for them to get a replacement into place, but I would hope they will stick to their prediction of Spring.

“We are now well into Spring and it’s only right that they should give us an approximate date even if there are reasons that gets delayed for unforeseen circumstances.”

The authority’s Green group leader, Councillor Kevin Foster said some residents in remote areas such as the Yorkshire Dales were continuing to suffer from very poor reception.

He said: “To not give a timeframe is just not good enough. They want to work without a deadline. At the moment it sounds like they are saying ‘when we will get round to it we will do it’.”