West Midlands Police's 999 call response times have approved
West Midlands Police response times to 999 calls are getting faster, marking a turnaround for the force once rated as one of the worst in the country.
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Chief Constable Craig Guildford told the West Midlands Police & Crime Panel that the time it takes for staff to answer calls and officers to then respond to them were much better than 18 months ago.
In September, it was announced the force had been taken out of special measures – just 10 months after being placed in them by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire & Rescue Services.
Inspectors raised concerns about a number of areas of the service last year but were impressed with the quick turnaround.
Chief Constable Guildford said the improvements had resulted in a 12.1 per cent drop in crime while arrest rates had doubled.
He said: “One of the key tests of a police force before you even do an investigation is 'can you answer the telephone?'
“Lots of feedback before I started the job was ‘well, we weren’t particularly great at doing that’.
“So over the last 18 months, we’ve moved three or four control rooms into one control room which is the C3 site at Aston.
“We do all of our call handling there for 999 and 101 and we dispatch all our resources from there.
“We’ve worked really hard at that and we’ve gone from being almost bottom in the country 18 months ago to being in the top two or three or five in the country.
“To put that into context, we answer 70,000 999 calls each month. Our average answer time this month is about four seconds.
“We also answer quite a lot of 101 calls. Our average now is just under half a minute in the last month.
“That’s a really good effort – the staff have pulled it out of the bag. They’ve worked really hard and we’ve got some good leadership. Compared to where we were, it’s a dramatic transformation.
“The next step is, you’ve answered the call in good time and now you need to get there in good time.
“Our average response times over the last 18 months – if it’s an emergency when we’ve gone on blue lights and sirens going, we’ve gone down from 14 minutes to now 11 minutes.
“And if we’ve got to get there within an hour, we used to average an hour and 41 minutes and now we average 40 minutes. So we’re getting to the jobs quicker.”
