The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Police calls ending before answer hit nearly two million
Almost two million calls to Scotland’s police force were ended before being answered in the last three years, new figures show.
Statistics released to the Scottish Tories under Freedom of Information found that 1,878,727 calls to both the non-emergency and emergency numbers were discontinued between the beginning of 2018 and November of last year.
A discontinued call, Police Scotland say, is where a caller hangs up before speaking to an adviser.
The vast majority of abandoned calls were seen in the non-emergency number 101, with the pandemic appearing to have a severe impact on the number of calls which ended before callers were able to speak to staff.
But the number of calls waiting more than two minutes for a 999 to be answered has increased by more than 17 times between 2019 and 2020.
In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the number of discontinued calls rose from 284,239 to 919,790.
A total of 590,279 callers hung up before speaking to anyone between the beginning of 2021 and November of that year.
The number of discontinued calls to 999 remained fairly consistent in the last three years, following a rise of just over 1,000 between 2018 and 2019.
In 2019, 4,619 callers hung up, compared with 4,723 in 2020 and 2,827 up to November 2021.
However, the number of calls which took more than two minutes to be answered rose dramatically in 2020.
In 2019, just 150 calls took more than 120 seconds to be answered, but a year later that figure had risen to 2,624 – an increase of more than 17 times.
A total of 2,827 calls to 999 were logged as taking longer than two minutes to be answered up to November 2021.
Scottish Tory justice spokesman Jamie Greene said: “This situation is completely unacceptable and unsustainable going forward.”
The Scottish Tories have pushed for a £36.5 million increase in planned funding for Police Scotland in 2022-23.
Assistant Chief Constable John Hawkins said that earlier in the week the force “announced significant investment in new technology to further protect and strengthen our emergency 999 and nonemergency 101 services”.
“At the end of last year, we introduced a range of measures to boost our 101 and 999 services, both of which performed well over the festive period against a backdrop of high demand and significant absence,” he said.
He continued: “Many of these discontinued 101 calls will be cases where callers have been instructed to hang up and dial 999 or they have decided to redial and select another option from a pre-recorded menu, they have opted to contact us via our website or they have realised they should be calling another agency.
“In addition, a significant number of both 999 and 101 calls are mis-dialled – callers realise and hang up.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “As Police Scotland have made clear, they have taken all necessary steps to protect the critical emergency 999 and non-emergency 101 services throughout the pandemic.
“The total budget for policing in 2022-23 is almost £1.4 billion, including an additional £40.5m increase in resource funding and a further £6.6m to mitigate the impact of Covid on the policing budget.”