
North Yorkshire Police say they are now answering over 95 percent of 999 calls in under ten seconds.
It comes after the force made significant investments in it's control room operations following a dip in call handling performance three years ago which saw just 40% of 999 calls answered within ten seconds.
Deputy Chief Constable Scott Bissett - says the improvement is pleasing to see.
"There's a national target of answering 90% of 999 calls in under 10 seconds.
From about July, August last year, we'd exceeded that on average. During April we answered. 95.5% of 999 calls in under 10 seconds.
That's a drastic improvement from where the force was in, around 2022, when it was answering under 40% in that time.
And that will place us really strongly nationally in terms of performance. So that's really pleasing and actually an awful lot of credit to all the staff that work in the force control room in terms of how hard they have worked to secure that improvement."
Chief Constable - Tim Forber - says investment in the force control room has paid off, he now wants to use technology to make further improvements.
"What I wouldn't want to do is put more people in there to improve that performance, what I am open to is, investment in technology, particularly as we look at the next generation of call handling technology to see how we can improve that further.
There's always a balance off between 999, and. 101. When we have particular spikes of 999 calls, our performance on 101 might dip slightly.
What I hope that we can do with future investments in technology is make sure that, particularly the 101 process, we digitize as much of that as possible. We make it easier to access information online that reduces the volume of 1 0 1 calls. That means then we can continue to focus on maximizing our emergency response."
Aprils figures saw North Yorkshire Police answer 90.45% of 999 calls in under ten seconds compared to just 85.43% in the same month last year. The current performance would place the North Yorkshire Force in 5th place nationally for meeting the 10 second target.
Comments
Add a comment