When you ring in the New Year by calling friends and relatives, spare a thought for Lizzie Beesley, writes David Duffy.

For the past three years she has focused all her working time and controlled a £300m budget to ensure that when you pick up the phone on the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, the phone will work.

She says: "If you ring your granny in Timbuktu you expect to get a reply, in just the same way as if she was in Manchester."

Dr Beesley is the Year 2000 programme director for BT, whose job has been to ensure BT customers are protected from the Millennium Bug - but her team's work has extended far beyond the confines of the BT network. She says: "When people pick up the phone and call someone they expect to get through. That's true whether they are calling someone else on the BT network or any other.

"That's why from the start of this programme we have been working with all the other telecom operators.

"It has been a unique situation, because we have sat down with people with whom we are normally locked in fierce competition, opened our project books and shared best practice.

"That has placed us in the position of being able to say to the regulator Oftel that as a sector there are no recognisable risks."

Dr Beesley says: "What we are saying is not that the network will work perfectly, but that it will work normally. "Sometimes it won't always work. We get problems - mice bite through cables, weather can cause disruption, kids set fire to equipment and in the Third World particularly, the telecommunication system is not as robust as we would like."

Dr Beesley said a particular and obvious concern was the 999 service and to strengthen the service this year, many more engineers and 999 operators are being brought in to cope.

She says: "Ninety eight per cent of our work on Year 2000 actually finished this time last year. At that point we were confident on the big issues.

"What we have been doing since then has been concentrated on addressing the simple fact that the Christmas and New Year holiday this year is very long. It is a ten day break with only two normal working days. "The busiest night of the week for the 999 service is always Saturday night, with a peak when the pubs shut and another when the clubs close.

"Last New Year we had a peak which was three and a half times the normal Saturday night.

"What will happen this year is obviously something of an unknown. The huge growth in mobile pones has also led to a very strong growth in 999 calls, with repeat calls to the same incident common on incidents like accidents on motorways.

"These all have to be dealt with and with so many people out and about this New Year's Eve we anticipate the number of 999 calls could be as high as five times the normal Saturday night. We believe we have everything in place in terms of networks and resources to cope. We have looked at the resources needed and have increased the number of engineers and operators on duty by 25 per cent." She said the average person working two or three shifts over the holiday would be paid about £500.

She adds: "Communications are essential. Business depends on them, the markets would not operate with them. Our business customers understandably want reassurance that everything will work and our job has been to make sure that those arrangements are in place."

She is now confident the only ringing sounds heard in the new Millennium won't just be in the ears of those suffering from over indulgence.

Story date: Thursday 30 December

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.