Wiltshire Police Chief praises control room for slashing 999 call responses
Latest figures show 90% of emergency calls are answered in under 10 seconds
Wiltshire's Police Chief has praised the work of her control room staff for slashing 999 call answering times.
The latest figures from November last year reveal that 90 per cent of emergency calls are answered in 10 seconds or less.
Chief Constable Catherine Roper says she hopes we can see that the service provided by the Force is improving all the time.
"We're here to make sure we're keeping Wiltshire safe and we're here to make sure that we're providing the best possible service," she said.
The Chief admitted that negative experiences had dented trust and confidence in the organisation, but said the control room staff had worked with 'dedication' to get better.
"I think it's a mark of the dedication and the focus of all the people that have been working in the control room to make sure that they have really been improving the service that they're giving," Chief Constable Roper told Greatest Hits Radio.
She said that the most important aspect of the improvement is the reassurance for communities that if they pick up the phone, Police are giving an improved service.
Continued improvement needed
When Wiltshire Police was placed into the Engage process in 2022, the control room was subjected to a lot of scrutiny.
The Force has invested heavily in a better working environment for staff taking 999 calls, including technology, processes and people.
The Chief said the environment is now 'wildly different' from what is was before, with increased resources, checks, balances and guides to help them deliver the best service possible.
"Our incredible new people who have gone into the control room, they're learning, aren't they!" Chief Roper said, adding: "That's the other element of confidence I have is that as they become more established and they've become more experienced, that actually our service will continue to improve."
Part of the Chief's strategy for improvement is reducing the demand placed on the control room.
That's not to say people won't be able to access to Police services, more is dialling 999 or 101 the most appropriate course of action.
One section of that is online engagement.
She said: "We're trying to make some of those elements easier. One of the areas that we get quite a lot of questions on is things like sort of uploading desk cams and that and those kind of things."
Other methods include the Right Care, Right Person scheme, which asks if Police are the right people to respond to an incident.