Stone residents contacting Staffordshire Police by phone are seeing shorter waiting times, the force has reported.
More than 88% of 999 calls were answered within 10 seconds in the 12 months to February, while the average time to answer 101 calls fell to under two minutes during the final six months of that period.
A report to the Police and Crime Public Performance Meeting on Thursday 14 May said there had been further improvements this year. Senior officers also told Staffordshire’s Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner Ben Adams that callers who had faced the longest waits were receiving apologies from the force.
The meeting report said:
“Our focus to provide a responsive service and to be there when you need us most has seen 999 performance improve over the last 12 months; we are now answering 92 per cent of 999 calls within 10 seconds. Meanwhile, our non-emergency (101) call performance is also improving, in February our average time to answer 101 calls was just over one minute.
“To ensure officers attend emergencies as quickly as possible, we have recently launched two new initiatives, Operation Freshwater and Project Maximus. Both ensure we have the right resources in the right place at the right time.
“This work is allowing us to attend incidents more quickly, with an overall reduction in our attendance times for the most critical incidents (grade 1s) and we continue to see a reduction in attendance times for grade 2 incidents. We’re starting to see some real progress, improving how we manage incidents, strengthening our response and shifting demand in a way that better supports Staffordshire communities.”
Acting Chief Constable Becky Riggs told the meeting that improving emergency and non-emergency call handling had been one of the force’s priorities since its last PEEL inspection.
She said:
“Due to some important and very focused work we have seen some significant improvements in that particular area in the last six months.
“Operation Freshwater focusses on 999 calls and harmful calls that require either a 20 minute or two-hour response. The more generalist calls are a slightly more delayed response, but it focusses not only on how quickly we can take the call, but equally, if we deploy an officer through a risk assessment, how quickly we can get them there.
“Maximus is a bit longer-term in terms of how we manage some of the demand in crimes and incidents that come into the force and what’s the best way of managing those incidents, whether that’s about deployment of resources, desk-based investigations, sending of specialists or through enhanced video responses.
“We are partway through our work in relation to that, but both of those projects are projecting very good statistics.”
Mr Adams said there had been “significant improvement” in response to 101 calls, and added that there had also been continuing reductions in call abandonment.
He said:
“I have been concerned about abandonment, and this suggestion that maybe people were using other methods to report, they’re online at the same time as hanging around on the phone.”
Acting Chief Constable Riggs said the force was contacting people who had been left waiting the longest for their call to be responded to, in some cases up to two hours.
She added:
“We also give them an apology, because it’s not the service that I, this organisation or members of the public would expect.
“What we have found from call backs is a really positive step for the organisation for those people who have been let down, we get above and beyond what we would expect. We get a broader, richer intelligence picture as a consequence of those call backs.”
