Tony Blair must urgently address the contingency plans needed to respond to a major terrorist incident, the shadow home secretary has warned.

Oliver Letwin said a lack of coordination coupled with lethargy in Whitehall could costs lives in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist outrage.

In an interview with this website, Letwin said that a third of the protocols agreed between the emergency services over 12 months ago have still not been signed.

"What we need to do is to increase significantly our level of preparedness to deal with the after-effects of an outrage if it occurs and to contain it," he says.

"I'm increasingly concerned that there is lethargy in Whitehall. I don't mean that they're not trying to do the right things, they are, but I think there is inertia and they're doing them much too slowly," he said.

"There isn't the sense of urgency, there isn't the sense of coordination which is required, which is why I called some while ago for a coordinating cabinet minister."

Letwin said that there are nine departments involved in the process and condemned ministers for failing to ensure matters are followed through.

"I get a stream of information coming into my office about things that aren't happening on the ground," he says.

"I discovered recently through a parliamentary question that one third of all the protocols that should have been signed a year ago between various parts of the emergency services in each locality hadn't been signed.

"That could cost precious minutes or hours at times of emergency, so there is a desperate need for urgent attention to increasing our level of preparedness."

The shadow home secretary said there was "real justification" to suggest that the "level of terrorist threat that we face in the United Kingdom at present is unprecedented".

"I was in the Grand Hotel in Brighton when it was bombed, I know what terrorism has been before, but we now face a level of threat that is quite above what it was before," he warns.

"We have the prime minister telling us that the likelihood of something actually happening that is pretty bad is so great that he's willing to describe it as inevitable."