Three-quarters of police forces are failing to hit 999 call response time targets - so how does YOUR area fare?
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Three-quarters of police forces are failing to meet 999 call time targets, MailOnline can reveal today. Current guidelines state handlers should pick up 90 per cent of calls within ten seconds. Yet just ten of the 43 forces in England and Wales hit this goal over the entirety of the last 12 months.
Calling 999 can be a matter of life and death, ex-Home Secretary Priti Patel said. During her time in the role, forces were made to publish 999 answering times because the public 'deserve to know that their local police force will be at the end of the phone, ready to leap into action at seconds’ notice to protect them from harm'.
Lincolnshire Police Force topped MailOnline's league table, achieving the sub-10 standard on 93.8 per cent of its 108,000 calls in the 12 months ending October 2024. Gwent Police in Wales and Sussex Police came joint second (93.3 per cent). Leicestershire (92.5 per cent) and Kent (92.3 per cent) rounded out the top five.
At the other end of the league table ranked West Mercia, which answered little over three-quarters of its calls in within the standard. It was followed by Durham (79 per cent), Essex Police (80.3 per cent), Dyfed-Powys (80.4 per cent) and Wiltshire (80.8 per cent).
MailOnline's audit shows there has been a slight improvement from the 12-month period in March 2023-2024, where not a single police force was averaging a sub-10 second answer rate. Call answering time is the time taken for a call to be transferred from BT to a force, and the time taken by that force to pick-up.
