PROGRESS is being made on improving call response times to the North Yorkshire Police control room, a meeting heard this week.

The announcement coincides with a slight reduction in call numbers, as well as changes to the force control room (FCR) following months of problems which left non-emergency callers waiting for minutes at a time for their call to be answered.

This month’s public accountability meeting, overseen by Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan with North Yorkshire Police, heard the FCR received 6,959 emergency calls in September, down from 8,551 the previous month, compared with 6,082 in September 2016.

Deputy Chief Constable Lisa Winward said the time taken to answer 999 calls was dropping, and while targets were still being regularly missed, they were moving in the right direction.

She said: “We’re trying to achieve 10 seconds. We watch the statistics every single day, we speak to our staff in the control room every single day. On Sunday we achieved a 59 second call handling for 101 and six seconds for 999 calls. We’d like to achieve that every day; we know we’re not doing that at the moment, but that’s what we aspire to.”

A report before the meeting showed that the average time taken in September 2017 to answer a 101 call was two minutes and 19 seconds, an improvement on August’s time of three minutes and 25 seconds, and July’s high of four minutes and 13 seconds . The force's target time for 101 calls is one minute.

John Mackfall, UNISON branch secretary, told the meeting that through the changes introduced, and new staff starting later this year and in 2018, the force aimed to meet their targets next February or March “and getting where we should have been six months ago”.

Mrs Mulligan and Deputy Chief Constable Lisa Winward said the improvements to the FCR were “a priority” for the force, as they wanted it to be “an exemplary service”.

DCC Winward reminded the public a callback facility had been implemented for non-emergency calls which had proven to be successful, and urged people to use that rather than redialling 999.