New sources this week reported that a UK police force failed to answer 20,000 phone calls earlier this year.
Cambridge Constabulary call-handlers didn’t manage to answer over 300 non-emergency calls a day during June and July, with the majority simply being abandoned by callers before they were answered.
Managers blamed changes to non-emergency telephone lines for the ‘decline in service’ following the replacement of a switchboard with an automated answering system, amongst other changes.
Local commentators called the missed call figures ‘highly disturbing’, with one saying that that ‘It’s all very well trying to save money, but in the end the public are paying for a quality service not a second class one.’ Some even hinted that the problems were due to cutbacks in telephone answering staff.
According to newspaper reports, the 999 system is managing to achieve its target of answering ninety per cent of all emergency calls in under ten seconds, but a report to a meeting of Cambridgeshire Police Authority’s scrutiny committee showed that over fifty per cent of non-emergency calls are not answered within the thirty second target time.
A police spokesman was reported in a local paper as saying that that the force had made several business changes to its non-emergency call handling service to ensure that it reduces costs, and that:
“A decline in service was anticipated during the early stages of implementation and this will be improved through a series of developments in call automation.
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