The UK needs to "sharpen up our act" when it comes to contacting Turkish authorities, Keith Vaz has said after meeting the "heartbroken" husbands of two of the three sisters feared to have travelled to Syria with their nine children.

British sisters Khadija Dawood, 30, Sugra Dawood, 34, and Zohra Dawood, 33, and their children, aged between three and 15, are feared to have travelled to link up with terror group Islamic State (IS).

Mr Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, described it as a "terrible case" and said authorities need to stop sending emails and instead "pick up a phone" in these "life-and-death situations".

The husbands of two of the three sisters met Mr Vaz after their lawyers said police were "complicit in the grooming and radicalising" of the women.

Last week, Akhtar Iqbal and Mohammed Shoaib broke down as they pleaded desperately for their wives to return so they could go back to their "normal lives".

After today's meeting in Westminster which lasted an hour and 15 minutes, Mr Vaz said: "They are clearly heartbroken."

He said he is meeting police tomorrow to discuss the case.

"I think three things need to be done. First of all there needs to be clear lines of communication between the police and the families. They need to meet at a very senior level with the police to try and get as much information as possible - information that can be shared with the family, that isn't operational.

"Secondly, it is very clear that we have four missing days from the family arriving in Istanbul and then crossing the border between Turkey and Syria.

"And I still think we need to sharpen up our act as far as contacting the Turkish authorities are concerned. Turkey has always been very responsive but there's still this desire to send emails. Well, you know, you can't.

"We are dealing now with life-and-death situations where you have to pick up a phone, a hotline, between the United Kingdom and Istanbul and tell the authorities that people are missing, get photographs to them as soon as possible, because this repeats a pattern that we've seen before with Bethnal Green and the three young girls there, which was not followed in Brent for the three young men because people acted very quickly, and they made phone calls instead of sending emails and therefore they were able to apprehend the three boys before they even landed in Istanbul.

"That's the kind of urgent quick action that we need.

"And finally, I think what we also need to do is to make sure that communities realise they should be in the driving seat on these issues.

"It can't be done by Whitehall. It's got to be done by parents and communities. They are first and foremost responsible for watching and learning and listening to whatever is going on.

"The final point about the criticisms concerning the way in which the police have dealt with this - the allegations of radicalisation. These will need to be examined and I am meeting the police tomorrow.

"Of course they deny that this was the case. But I think this is something that needs to be cleared up between the family and police so that they're reassured that this never happened."