By Humberside Police says Home Office data on emergency responses is ‘not accurate’
Humberside Police have hit back at the Home Office after new figures revealed that they are the slowest force in the country to answer emergency calls.
Forces across the country have the target of answering 90% of emergency calls within ten seconds, but Humberside Police only answer 2% within ten seconds according to the study.
In the first-ever batch of national data, it was revealed that nearly three million ‘life and death’ calls a year are being made to wait longer than ten seconds for help.
Deputy Chief Constable Paul Anderson has said: “I welcome any data that enables the public to see how their local force is performing and we are committed to fully supporting this approach.
“However, in this instance, the data presented does not accurately reflect the call handling performance of 999 calls once these are passed to Humberside Police.
“At present, despite representations, this data still includes the whole journey of a 999 call. This starts with a BT operator, and crucially, includes the time taken for them to divert the call to Humberside Police.
“The time this process takes varies significantly across the whole country, and in our region, there are delays of up to 7 seconds for the call to be passed to Humberside Police and this delay is currently included in this data.
“We have raised this issue with the Home Office, and we are now working closely with communications providers to understand why such delays sometimes occur in us being passed the calls.
“Humberside Police have just moved to a state-of-the-art contact and control centre, providing us with one of the UK’s leading Police call centres.
“Once the calls are received by Humberside Police, both 999 and 101 call handling performance remains one of the most timely and effective in the country.”
