py_megapixel
Established Member
What I've heard is that it does not accept grid refs.You say that, but the one time I have called 999 (for an ambulance) the only thing they wanted was a postcode, which is a bit difficult if you're on a canal in a rural area.
I often go into remote areas on walks, and though I've never had to call 999 from such an area, a relative has. Apparently Mountain Rescue are capable of finding grid references, but 999 won't put you through to them unless you give them a postcode as their system won't accept the grid reference. The Ordnance Survey's database is capable of providing latitude and longitude for any given grid reference, so it probably isn't too hard for them to produce some kind of integration, assuming that @najaB is correct about the acceptance of latitude and longitude.
What the people designing this system seem not to have understood is that the emergency services might need to be called, as was the case in this derailment, to some arbitary point in the middle of nowhere. Here's an example. What's the postcode here? Who knows. There almost certainly isn't one.
The other thing emergency services are starting to accept is a What3Words address, but the app is still a little buggy and of course not many people have it. However, W3W already have a public API to query longitude and latitude for any particular 3-word address.