North Yorkshire Police improve 999 answer times

Last updated Aug 30, 2023

North Yorkshire Police force control room.

North Yorkshire Police has recorded an improved 999 call answer time performance, according to latest figures.

The force answered 83% of calls in July 2023 within the national target of 10 seconds. By comparison, just 44% were answered on time in November 2022.

There has been a 30% increase in the number of emergency calls made to the force control room in the past year.

This month, police recorded the highest number of 999 calls made in any August in history with 10,800 calls — 400 more than the same time last year.

The improvement comes after Zoe Metcalfe, the Conservative North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner awarded the force control room £1.8 million a year to improve response times.

The money was earmarked to fund the appointment of 36 additional communications officers, 12 additional dispatchers, six established trainers and two additional police inspectors.

Superintendent Fee Willey, who heads up the force control room, said:

“In the control room we’ve changed our ways of working. We looked at all our processes to see what was stopping our people being efficient in their roles – what were they doing and how were they doing it. We stripped away anything that was not relevant or slowed them down.

“We found that our trained and highly-skilled call handlers were being restricted by the number and complexity of the forms that they needed to complete for every single call that they received.

“We kept any mandated question sets, but beyond that we gave the call handlers freedom to follow their own initiative, while still being able to refer to question sets if needed. This has resulted in a much speedier process to dispatch officers to incidents while still providing a succinct level of information to the attending officers.

“And the more efficient that the force control room is in performing its role, the quicker that officers can be dispatched to scene.”