First contact

There was a period during the first half of the nineteenth century when the UK police service was right on the cutting edge of the telecommunications revolution.

Projects such as the City of Glasgow Police’s Signal Box Network of 1932, or the Metropolitan Police’s launch of the world’s first emergency number service in 1937, showed British police forces were innovative users of technology.

At this time police phone boxes were not only the most effective way of raising an alarm, they were frequently the only telephones members of the British public could access.
The modern telecommunications revolution represents a paradigm shift on what has gone before. Mobile phones and advances in digital telephony mean that most people carry a mobile phone everywhere they go, and have grown accustomed to using it to administer their public affairs. Whether banking, paying bills or simply requesting information, the public have come to expect instant service via a single number and a high tech call-centre.

Police forces are more than capable of running the kind of advanced telecommunications network that is capable of deploying resources to a 999 call. Yet the service is struggling to keep on top of a rising tide of non-emergency calls.

HMIC’s Thematic report Open All Hours of December 2001 reported a rise of almost 31 per cent in 999 calls made between 1996/1997 and 2000/2001 in England and Wales. This rise came with a corresponding deterioration in call answering times “exacerbated by an increase in the inappropriate use of the 999 service where members of the public should have dialed the local non-emergency number”. The report showed that in some forces there were more than 50 local non-emergency numbers and a general lack of public awareness about which one was best suited for a non-emergency call.

The report made a number of recommendations that have since formed the foundation of what is now classed ‘citizen-centric policing’. One was that ACPO and the Association of Police Authorities (APA) “pursue the feasibility of a single recognisable number for all non-emergency calls and the possibility of joint call handling arrangements between agencies.” Another recommendation was that ACPO and the APA should develop a national strategy
to improve the handling of calls.

The single non-emergency number was one of the more ambitious ‘citizen-centric’ projects proposed by the Home Office in its National Policing Plan 2005–2008 last November, and is still in the early stages of development. The new National Call Handling Standards (NCHS) framework is complete and was launched on April 29,
in Birmingham.

The supporting document is 250 pages long and is intended to provide, in a single copy, a comprehensive reference for all involved in the call handling function. The majority of the document is taken up with reference material such as call process diagrams, reprints of Police Standards Unit’s volume management best practice, workflows and case studies.

Chief Insp Brian Hills, who was seconded from Durham Constabulary to act as NCHS Project Manager, told Police Professional the standards will be a challenge for forces.

“The National Call Handling Project is a tripartite initiative to improve the quality of service for members of the public – who we now call our customers – and meeting their needs at first point of contact. The document introduces new measures of what forces should be aiming to achieve. They have been deliberately set to be higher than industry standards and will be quite challenging, as the standards provide both a framework for measuring quality of calls as well as new quantitative targets. However, forces will now be assessed in exactly the same way as neighbours, and the public will know that, no matter where they are in the country, they will receive the same quality service.”

Findings from British Crime Surveys and MORI polls suggest that the public is less concerned with having to wait for 30 or 40 seconds to reach a call handl